The "Leading Lensmasters" Shell Game

When I first joined Squidoo (March 2006) it had been out of private beta-testing for a month or two. (I waited until they announced they were actually going to pay lensmasters -- made about $1.25.) Anyway, I had never heard of any of the Squidoo staff -- so, reasoning that there would be others in the same boat, I wrote a series of articles on them.

Within days, each of these received exactly one five-star rating (except for Heath Row's which received exactly one one-star rating) leading me to the conclusion that the Squidoo staff has nothing better to do than look up their own names on Squidoo.

I discovered Squidoo the way most people find websites -- through Google or another popular search-engine. I was trying to find out more about RSS, which is the main reason I've continued with the lensmaster "thing" -- I like the Squidoo RSS module. (Way to go, Gil and Corey!)

It wasn't until much later that I began to suspect that the Squidoo platform was far from a level playing field. I should have caught on when one of my earliest lenses The Real Captain Squid, garnered my first (sorry Heath, my second) one-star rating. True to the Squidoo tradition, it's innocuous fluff, but I broke two cardinal rules:

First, I deviated from the "party line," daring to question Seth Godin's premise that you have to tell all about yourself in order to gain your customers' trust before you can trick them into buying worthless crap. Second, and far more serious, I wrote a popular page that reached a lensrank of 228 -- climbing fast and threatening to break into the top 100 -- where it would gain a lot of exposure and possibly get more traffic as a result.

I don't want to stray too far from the topic at hand, but it is important to know a little about Squidoo's Lensrank system and about Google AdSense to appreciate the diabolical treachery of the "Leading Lensmasters" scam.

Lensrank is Squidoo's internal ranking system which is one factor in determining your placement in Squidoo's internal search results and the sole determinant of their various top 100 lists. It was originally described, somewhat disingenuously as "completely transparent," but is now characterized as "super secret."

It is substantially based on four things: sales revenue -- through Squidoo modules, (which take a 50% cut), but not any sales you generate through your own links; traffic -- both internal Squidoo traffic (which doesn't correlate well with sales) and external (which does); average "star" rating -- which is the average of the number of stars you are awarded by other lensmasters (who are your direct competition -- actual customers don't get a vote); and "lens freshness" -- how recently you hit edit, publish -- a valid consideration for breaking news, but totally irrelevant for the 99% or so of content that is static or "evergreen."

AdSense is Google's contextual advertising product. At the top and bottom of every lens there is a box containing ads marked "Ads by Google." One of Google's 'bots scans your lens content, then tries to match one of their paid ads to the content of your page. You -- or rather Squidoo -- gets paid when somebody clicks on an ad.

I am amused when certain denizens of the Amazon Associates forums "brag" about their AdSense revenue. AdSense clicks are a sign that your readers found a vaguely related and highly commercial ad more interestiing than your content. They are basically booby-prizes for awful writing.

Squidoo pools all the AdSense revenue, the redistributes it based not on AdSense clicks, but on traffic. I should be ashamed of myself, but I like that too. Anyway, that explains why traffic -- even low-quality "lookie-loo" traffic -- is important to your Squidoo income, and why I find the "Leading Lensmaster" scam so egregious.

If you doubt the positive effects of having a high-powered link from Squidoo's home page to one's Lensmaster page, try looking these "alledged" splogs up in Google.

Chances are you won't find them, but they still have high enough lensranks to qualify as "featured lenses" even though they may not be indexed because they are "undeveloped lenses." (Anyway they did -- lensrank information has since been removed.)

Does this sound like zero tolerance to you?

The "under construction" pages that now show up are curiously devoid of AdSense content. Coincidence?

Victory!! (sort of) There's a new batch of "Featured Lensmasters" on Squidoo's homepage now, mostly "Giant Squids." Apparently the Giant Squids meet some kind of standards ...

You'll notice that at least one of these "leaders" has cleaned up his act a bit. I'm leaving the list alone though. Hey, a link's a link.

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