A stepping stone? Yes, definitely. Who doesn’t love a few extra bucks coming in every month? In fact, it’s possible to make several hundred bucks a month this way.

Why is it not worth worrying about using lensrank to earn money? Because the amount you will earn tops out pretty quickly. Getting a lens in the top 10,000 or 15,000 lenses is HARD.

The top payout tiers are competitive. In fact, I would venture to say that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something where people spend so much time trying to make an extra two dollars.

There are a lot of people out there that try to ‘game’ lensrank with rating swaps or traffic swaps or exchanges or multiple accounts or whatever. I’m not really surprised that people try to game or optimize their rankings. What just shocks me is the amount of time people are willing to put into it.

Think about it. It’s easy for a small item sale from amazon or eBay to add up to more than an entire month’s of effort on gaming lensrank ($2).

Conversely, if you are really worried about lensrank or people trying to ‘game’ it. I wouldn’t be.

Be grateful that they are wasting their time doing incredibly unproductive things.

If you run across one, report them. No need to crow it to the rooftops or go on witch hunts across the interwebs trying to find pepole who are gaming a ranking mechanism on a medium size website…

Instead of responding to them or worrying about them, go build your next lens that’s going to make some real money.

1. Your ratings aren’t fooling anyone but yourself- every once in a while I’ll come across a lens with a lensrank of over 140,000 (Lensrank: the lower the number the better, 1 is best) and 80+ star ratings. With a lensrank that low, you are averaging 1 or fewer visitors a week and haven’t updated your lens in over 2 months. But hey, you somehow got 80 ratings from people that liked the page? I doubt it and Squidoo’s ranking system obviously doubts it as well. In this example, the lensmaster comes out looking very poorly and their other lenses are immediately suspicious in my opinion.
2. You are wasting your time – Instead of keeping up with swapping ratings, you could spend your time making more lenses or promoting the lenses you have to people who want the information you are providing. The ROI of ratings swaps is probably close to if not zero.
3. Ratings don’t make you money – Yes, having a highly ranked lens can make you money every month (up to $11 or so for the top lenses -see Squidconomy) but ratings aren’t the way to high lensrank utopia. The power of multiple ratings is dampened significantly if you don’t have any other metrics to back it up like sales, traffic, or user engagement outside of star ratings (polls, plexo voting, etc.)
4. Is a star a star? - I have seen no evidence to show that every star ranking is treated equally (or unequally) by Squidoo. Although if I was managing the algorithm then I would definitely have a function in there that weighs star ratings from accounts with no lenses differently from star ratings from accounts with many popular lenses. Wouldn’t you?
5. The Upside potential is low – okay, so lets say you go to every rating swap you can find and get 100 rankings on your lens and manage to squeak into the second squidoo payment tier for a whopping $1.80 or so…oh gee, what a great deal. Several hours of work to make a whole 2 dollars. and since rankings fade in value with time, unless you start getting some real visitors it’s probably a one shot wonder.