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.

  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.
Captain Says:
Don’t worry about star rankings, they come when they come. If you are worried about what or how many star ratings you have, you clearly don’t have enough lenses and should build more. Rating swaps are not only slightly shady, but have no lasting benefit and are a waste of your valuable time.