I posted a while back about the Squidoo Slap. Now it seems that Hubpages and Tumblr are starting to tighten the reigns on people using their sites for marketing.

I'm seeing posts on a number of forums complaining about these crackdowns.

"Who do they think they are?"
"They're on a power trip"
etc.

To look at it on the surface, you might think the owners of these sites are against marketers. After all (as most of the complainers claim) the content we're putting up on their sites is excellent, high-quality stuff. Providing value to their visitors.

This is assuming the complaints are coming from people who are posting legitimate content, not just spamming the sites.

What justification do they have to shut our pages down or limit our ability to post?

Well, I hate to tell you this but if you're going to play in someone else's sandbox, you have to play by their rules. The only justification they need is the desire to stop this kind of marketing on their site.

They're providing this service for free so if they want to stop other marketers from using their site, that's up to them.

And when you think about it a bit, it makes sense. These sites are rarely set up purely out of the owner's desire to serve the internet community.

They want to make money just like us.

Having a bunch of other marketing messages on their site that are not controlled by them just creates leaks that could take people off the site before their own marketing reach them.

Internet marketers have this same concern. We often don't want to link to other sites from ours unless it's a monetized link of some sort. You can lose visitors, drain pagerank, etc.

And when something like Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge highlights a certain site, as it did with Tumblr this year, that site suddenly gets a large influx of relatively newbie marketers setting up pages that link away from the site.

They may think the content they're using is fantastic and they may have worked hard on it, but in most cases it's nothing that can't be found somewhere else.

Squidoo was set up with marketers in mind and look what ended up happening. Google penalized them because of what was happening on the site and they had to crack down a bit to get back on track (which they seem to be doing).

Do you think that sites that are not targeted to marketers really want to take a chance of that happening to them?

While these kinds of sites can work well as part of a larger strategy, it's business suicide to rely on them for too much. For a technique to be effective in the long term, you really need to have complete control over all the components yourself.

Otherwise, one of the sites could decide to take their ball and go home, and there's nothing you can do about it.