Lensrank explained (really)

Lensrank is what the name says: a ranking of lenses. If your lens is no.1 - it's the best lens in the whole million lenses out there! If it's somewhere in the 10.000 it's still doing alright.

Below 50.000 it is probably getting less than 1 visitor a day, and you have not worked on it in since two weeks ago (or more)

Below 100.000 - your lens is not getting traffic and hasn't been voted on in ages.

Below 200.000 - your lens is probably spam or not is not live yet.

BUT since the amount of lenses is constantly growing, lensrank changes too. In a year time 50.000 may be as respectable a lensrank as 10.000 is now. (writing Juli 2008) [I was right: lensrank of 10.000 is not just respectable: it's good. Lensrank below 30.000 is great now.]

Lensrank can go up and down.
That's just the nature of the game. See here a graph of the visitors numbers and lensrank of one of my highest ranking lenses (though not one, as you can see, with enormous amounts of visitors).



As you can see the timelines of your stats and your lensrank aren't synchronized.

This is because the timeline of your visitor numbers does NOT include any days your lens didn't get visitors.
Your lens did have lensrank the whole time, so that's shown in it's entirety.

At A you see lensrank slowly dropping, due to lack of visitors and probably also lack of attention on my part. This lens just lingered there for a while and lensrank suffered.

At B you see lensrank suddenly going up. Probably someone voted on my lens, or favored it or something, because it had hardly any traffic yet.

The main point here is: whatever votes you have, whatever angel blessings a lens got - if nothing happens (no RECENT traffic, no RECENT sales, no RECENT votes, no RECENT changes - lensrank will go down).

Of the factors I noted at the beginning, the following can be influenced by the lensmaster themselves:

• Freshness


• Become a giant squid

That's right: only one thing really... Becoming a giant squid is obviously a lot of work... Still worth the effort. It involves making consistently good lenses - and at least 50 of them.

But what if you're not about to become giant squid...
What does lens freshness mean?

Lens freshness means your lens has been edited recently. That's right: new lenses and lenses that have been recently edited get a boost in lensrank.

Giant squids get a chance at a further honor: a purple star. These are hand selected from lenses that are submitted to the purple star program. Like LOTD purple stars are a rare honor. In this case six are selected each week.

Only lenses made by giant squids are eligible.

There are three main ways lensmasters influence each others lensrank:

1. votes / thumbs up


2. favorite it!


3. squid angel blessing

When lensmasters thumb up each others lenses, they give those lenses a boost in lensrank.

More thumbs is more effect, though it levels out.

What has even more effect is if we favorite each other's lenses.

There is a group of extra special lensmasters that can boost your lensrank a lot more: the squid angels.

Squid angels can single handedly boost lensrank or make it plummet.

Again: more ratings is a bigger effect. So if several angels bless your lens, that's even better.

Lenses get a higher lensrank when they get more visitors. It becomes a significant effect if your lens gets more than say 100 visitors a week.

It doesn't matter where your visitors come from: whether they come from forums, search engines, blogs or even private Emails: more visitors means higher lensrank.

If you use your lenses to sell stuff - and use the built in squidoo sales modules for the purpose - sales means a boost in lensrank.

That is: if you get a sale through your amazon module, you get a percentage of that sale, and a boost in lensrank.

If you get a sale through an amazon affiliate link (that you got from Amazon, not through squidoo), you still get a percentage of the sale, but not a boost in lensrank.

There is word from HQ on this one: it's definite that the click outs from lenses is factored in on your lensrank.

In other words: if people click on your links, your lens rank goes up.

Anything a visitor does on your lens is counted towards lensrank. Whether it's writing in your guestbook, voting in a poll, voting in a plexo, adding a link to a plexo or joining a duel.

It's clear that inbound links (aka: links from other pages TO your lens) are likely a positive factor in lensrank. Squidoo has a set interest in having lenses on their platform that other people think are great, and link to. They also have a set interest in people promoting their lenses - what promotes one lens, also promotes Squidoo as a whole.

So inbound links are likely a plus for our lenses, though it's hard to see how it would be measured.

Outbound links are another matter. Outbound links are links on your lens, to some other webpage online.

Traditionally Squidoo favored outbound links: they wanted people to share their favorite links about their topic. They also advertised Squidoo as a great place to share your enthusiasm for your own website, and build some links to it. (Getting links to your site is a good way to get Google to notice it).

However, with people abusing the system, they've now added a limit to the amount of outbound links most lensmasters can have on their lenses: 9 per domain. That is: unless you're a giant squid, you cannot link to your own site more than 9 times from the same lens.

The question is: do they think outbound links are still a good thing, as long as you stick with the 9 links per domain rule, or are outbound links now a reason to pull lensrank down? I would think the first.

If I were Squidoo, and had not changed my philosophy too much by spammers abusing the system, and I wanted to reward lensmasters for sharing valuable online information, I'd improve their lensrank a bit with more links to different domains.

There must be some point system beneath the lensrank algorithm. Let's say I link to site A: AAAA.com. The first link to AAAA.com helps my lensrank a bit. The second one doesn't: it's a link to the same domain, so it is likely not to add too much to the lens. Also, a second link makes me (as a lensmaster) more likely to be here purely for SEO reasons. So the second link doesn't count. However, a link to BBBB.com will also give my site a slightly better lensrank. Etc.

There is probably a cap on this as well: the tenth site you link to probably doesn't help as much for your lensrank than the first.

Another potential issue here: do link plexo's count as outbound links? They are, obviously, but that does not automatically mean they count in the lensrank algorithm.

To get a lens into the top 100 you need a few of these factors combining.
It's for instance not very likely that a lens will get into the top 100 without ANY votes. It would have to get A LOT of visitors and sales to compensate for that.

[disclaimer] These factors are rumored to affect your lensrank, but very hard for us lensmasters to figure out. [/disclaimer]

• Time of visitor stay on lens (longer -> higher lensrank).
  This might be a measurement of the quality of your lens content


• Backlinks: lenses with links from outside squidoo would get a higher squidoo rating off the bat.
  I find it hard to believe that's true, since traffic is also to some extent dependent on backlinks - and a lens with a lot of low quality (spammy) backlinks does not really deserve a higher lensrank based on backlinks alone.
  However, this one does seem to be confirmed by the official Lensmaster faq


• visitor activity on your lens (voting, writing in your guest book, joining a duel)
  This one has been debunked by Gil himself.

Unfortunately changes in my personal life, and in the way squidu is managed, have made me decide to stop answering questions on that forum. I'm also too busy to answer questions elsewhere.

I am available for consulting though, but that doesn't come cheap. For $99 you get a month of asking whatever questions you want and advice on your SEO strategy, link building, optimizing your blog etc. SEO consult online publishing.

If you aren't willing to pay up, you'll have to be content to stay updated on my Marketing Spiritual Blog where I am also willing to answer any questions related to the posts. It also contains a free ebook.

I'm active on twitter and facebook.