Squidoo Lensrank Algorigthm Updates Again
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As tends to happen every 3 months or so, it appears that Squidoo HQ has again updated the special sauce that keeps Squidoo interesting, Lensrank.
The last lensrank ranking change brought us a much heavier weight placed on traffic and less placed on having a single star rating. This shifted focus towards bringing traffic to your Squidoo lens, and it worked.
Traffic to Squidoo has increased at a healthy clip the last few months, and the top 10,000 spots in LensRank have become a pretty competitive place to be, and HQ has rewarded lensmasters that have gotten there.
It appears that the rules have changed again. After moving to some new servers, there have been some bugs to work out of the system and HQ has been working very hard to do that. After yesterday’s LensRank update, there also appeared to be another fundamental shift in the way LensRank is calculated. Some people had lenses rise up the rankings, some had lenses fall, and for some I’ve talked to, they haven’t noticed much affect.
Note: The next little bit is purely my own speculation. HQ hasn’t confirmed any of this, neither has anyone else in the Squidoo community. This is solely conclusions (probably incorrect) that were drawn from looking at trends and patterns I saw emerge from my 300+ lenses. So take it for what you will.
From what I can tell, there are at least 20 different factors that can affect Lensrank in some way, so reverse-engineering the algorithm is not something that I have the time or inclination to do.
What I’ve seen
There appears to have been an overall heavier weighting on some factors relating to ‘lens quality’ such as:
- Age of lens
- # of modules
- # of ratings
- # angel blessings
I think that Traffic has remained heavily weighted, but the ‘threshold’ for it may have risen. An example would be that instead of more than X visitors having a solid boost on your LensRank Y visitors was needed. I saw the rankings of a lot of lenses with 0-20 visits a week get jumbled all over the charts, but the ones with 50 visits or more a week stayed pretty strong.
Source of traffic may also play a role, but I haven’t dug deep enough to find that one out yet…
Dashboard commissions don’t seem to matter a whole lot either way..
In short, building quality lenses with content that people want to read will make you money. I know, shocking, right?
Maybe I should change my name to Captain Obvious…
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Thanks Captain Squid! This is really useful - as a Squidoo newbie I had no idea how lensrank was calculated to this is veyr helpful for me. I’ve subscribed to the RSS I’m sur eyou have tonnes of great advice!