Roller Coaster Squidoo Lens Rankings?
By: RichardHave you noticed that your rankings are all over the place from one day to the next? If you have had a lens for a while you will notice that your rankings are never static. We suspect this is due to several factors, the most important being that Squidoo is still growing and thus in a dynamic state of flux. This roller coaster ride is partly due to the freshness of the lens content. We believe that the recency of the content helps preserve a high ranking although we have no hard evidence of this yet. Other factors likely include:
- Lens size, number of modules, etc.
- Traffic - both internal and referral.
- The number of outgoing text links.
- The star ranking (how other lensmasters have voted for you).
We’re very interested to hear from others what they think reasons for lens rank ups and downs might be - and what new factors are on the horizon for the algorithm?
July 7th, 2006 at 3:17 am
Clearly one of the main factors influencing lense rank is lense profitability. As soon as one of my lenses generates any affiliate revenue, the lense ranking goes through the roof.
I notice this most clearly on my 42 lense (http://www.squidoo.com/42). The correlation between lense rank and sales within the past week appears to be very high.
The “sales bonus” appears to fade pretty quickly. In some cases my lense ranking deteriorated the very next day, but more recently I have noticed that the effect wore off much slower and lasted as long as a week or two.
August 2nd, 2006 at 3:29 pm
I had one of my lenses drop from 1700-something to 4400-something overnight. I was kind of devistated! It’s taken weeks to get back up to 1700ish. I don’t know what it was either. I know I had rearranged the modules that day but couldn’t believe that would cause such a shift. I’m relieved to know it’s not just me.
November 20th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Thanks for posting. As the lenses become more numerous we will see the ranking fluctuate as newer more popular themes and topics come and go. My feeling is that having a few incoming links will help with the overall Google and Yahoo rankings which may be a factor in the Squidoo ranking formula. It makes sens that the same things that determine search rankings in the search engines will also be the things that affect rankings on Squidoo.
January 15th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I am a newbie to Squidoo as of last month, but was able to go from a rank of about 64,000 to ~135 within 72 hours. I set one of my lenses up using several of the main modules. Made no affiliate sells either so that didn’t help, YET! (Thanks for the tip Ronen!)
I simply emailed some of my friends (about 10) and asked them to check out my link. Next I registered for about 5 groups in similar categories as the lens. Finally I placed the link to my lens on one of my blogs and on a few other social bookmarking sites (Digg and Delicious). I tweaked some of the module content for each of the 3 days. That was it - then ~#135. A few weeks later now the lens is at #1681. I have made few updates since the highest ranking.
February 18th, 2007 at 5:12 am
It’s safe to say that the algorithm used to rank the lenses will always be in a state of change. The reason for this lies in the fact that it will always keep lensmasters from gaming the system for long periods of time. It attempts to make us all work from a level playing field. As time progresses, the addition of more lenses will seem to complicate matters of lens rank fluctuations even greater. So in the end, overall lens building skills, writing content and networking tactics are crucial to ones success.