Why Squidoo Ratings Swaps don’t work
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Even though it is clearly outlined in the Squidoo TOS as a no-no, I still run across Squidoo ‘rating swap’ threads on many marketing forums. If you run across one of these, I’d advise turning in another direction for several reasons, some of which may surprise you.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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?
- 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.
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Comments
You are absolutely right Captain. I made a somewhat similar comment in the squidu forums. People obsess about LR and people cheating with stars, or they try to cheat with stars. In the end, trying to cheat the system really does not work.
I never thought about it until this post, but the weight of a 5* rank from somebody who KNOWS about good lens making being “worth more” than a 5* from a non-squidoo-er who hasn’t got a clue seems to me to be logical. I know that praise from a Big Squid with snappy lenses FEELS more valuable than kind words from my non-computer-saavy buddies who are just amazed that I can do any of this.
One thing lens rank and ratings DOES do, at least for me, is generate feelings of success which in turn lead to more desire to improve my lenses in the absence of any financial gain from said activity. If ratings and lens rank served no other purpose than to provide some sort of gratification and encouragement during those lean beginning months, they would be valuable parts of the squidoo experience.
Excellent post Cap’n.
Just a supporting point.
Lensrank is based on what has happened in the recent past, so getting lots of ratings may give a boost now, but is not sustainable in the long term - things like link-building, better content is.
My observation is that lensrank is calculated on ranges. So, you may get a boost for one rating, a higher boost for 2-5, a bigger one for 6-10 etc. That means if you have 7 ratings, the next one might not actually make any difference.
Its a funny ol world eh Cap’ain.
I used to follow a marketing forum and stopped going for this very reason, it seemed they all just wanted to help each other spam other sites for their own gains!
I do have a question Mr. Captain Squid…I know of one Squid who has over 1000 lenses and they are all full of ezine articles without even an active link to the author…to me this is also spam…what should I do?
This has nothing to do with ratings swap, but what do you do when you have a string of 5 stars and then someone slams you with one star and brings it down to 4 1/2? It will take forever for it to get to the 5 star make again, since my lenses have yet to find the traffic.
[...] Here’s an interesting article I read on why Buying or Swapping ratings doesn’t work. Click Here for the [...]
[...] Arr… This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about how Lensrank, while a potentially nice boost, shouldn’t be a cornerstone of your money making plan. [...]
Couldn’t agree more Captain. Whilst such ratings swaps are annoying they really don’t achieve anything in the long term. As you say $1 for many hours work. Not really worth it is it?
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[...] and one favorite (thanks mulberry). This seems related, Captain Squid’s latest blog post is Why Squidoo Ratings Swaps don’t work, check it out if you haven’t [...]