However, in an effort to clean up the site after Google took a huge bite out of Squidoo’s traffic due to excessive spam and (perhaps) too much advertising, SquidooHQ has made the filters more persnickety than they used to be. I think you’ll be okay with a single-product lens, because you won’t have too many affiliate links on the same lens. (I can’t remember the affiliate limit now; it may be 10). On the other hand, I think the filters may be flagging some affiliate programs. I’m not sure, as I only use Zazzle and Amazon affiliate links; I haven’t ventured further afield.

Upshot: try a test lens, and see if what you used to do still gets through the filters.

I have been away from Squidoo for a while, and am a bit confused by the changes. Years ago, I joined and built small lenses to sell affiliate products. Can one still do that? I don’t mean review lenses that show dozens of products, I mean lenses that focus on one product. The more I look at Squidoo now, the more it seems that they are pulling away from letting us do what we joined them to do in the first place. Can I still sell one thing on one lens there?

Thanks,
Don

1. Log into Squidoo. Should be a link up top.
2. Go to your Dashboard and click “Edit” under the lens you want to edit, or click “Edit” in the sidebar of a lens you’re viewing.
3. Click the “Edit” button at the top right of each module to change its HTML code. Text modules let you edit HTML; many of the other modules are widgets that don’t let you edit them at the code level.

No, there’s no way to replace title text with a header, although you could leave off a module title and upload a header graphic into the Text With Big Image module to get the same effect. However, while I used to use header graphics, I’ve stopped doing so now that I’ve learned that:

• Search engines use header text as a strong ranking signal, when deciding what searches your page is relevant for. Squidoo’s headers and subheaders help our lenses get more search traffic.
• Usability studies like this one show that readers see plain text and ignore graphics (even if they aren’t ads) in a phenomenon known as “banner blindness.” That’s why news websites, blogs, and most other written content sites do NOT use header graphics for sections.
• Header graphics may be cut off on small screen devices like smartphones. You don’t know what browser somebody’s using, but you can be sure it wraps around text to fit within the screen.
• Foreign-language visitors can use Google translate or the equivalent to read our lenses — and they do. In my traffic stats, I always see a few people surfing in through translation software. It can only translate text.
• Vision-impaired users can’t read text hidden in graphics. And there’s a surprising number of them. The web has been a godsend for millions of blind people and anybody with dodgy vision, since they can customize screen readers to read webpages aloud to them or display text in a way they can see. Sometimes, there’s information you can’t convey in any way except through graphics, but there’s no point in concealing info that could just as easily be delivered as text.