Seth Godin And Squidoo Finally Respond To SPAM Problems

Seth Godin (prolific blogger, author and the founder of Squidoo) finally responded to the problems his company has been having with SPAM web sites.

An email sent out today from Seth Godin and the Squidoo team to thousands of their members says "Last week, a few dozen spammers exploited Squidoo and drove the rest of the Web crazy. They spammed tens of thousands of blogs and built thousands of worthless lenses, violating our Terms of Service with reckless abandon."

The reality is, spammers and search engine optimizers have been using Squidoo for over a year to help spam the Web.  It's disconcerting that Seth (the author of Permission Marketing and once vocal opponent to SPAM) would minimize the seriousness of the problem by passing this issue off as the work of a few bad apples.  In our experience using Squidoo to search for quality health information over the past year, it often seemed as though nearly every lens was questionable at best.  So much so, we finally stopped using the site.

So according to today's email and this post on the Squid Blog, here's what they have done to try and win back their credibility and fight SPAM on the Web: we've eliminated the tools that bad actors used to damage the rest of us. We've also added a squadron of people who hand review lenses, and we’ve made it easier for you (and anyone else) to report spam.

Is this too little too late?  We'll give Godin and Squidoo the benefit of the doubt for now, but we're still not using Squidoo as a resource to find helpful health wisdom.  They would have to delete ALL of the SPAM lenses on their site for us to feel comfortable using their service again.  Hopefully their squadron of people will do that soon.