Squid Maven

The Truth About Lensrank "Dings"
A lot of lensmasters don't understand that a lower star rating does not hurt their lens, just their personal feelings. A 1-star rating gives a lens a small boost versus more stars which give a bigger boost. However there really is such a thing as a "ding" and it's one of the powers granted to Squid Angels. A lensmaster who has been given "Angel powers" has the ability to "bless" or "ding" a lens. This is separate from regular voting or favorites and it does act on the lens' rank. Get blessed and your lensrank will rise. Get dinged and your lensrank will drop. It's up to the Angels themselves to choose if they want announce their actions or not so you may never know where or on what lenses they are casting their powers...

If you want to ask for an Angel Blessing, you do so in the Angel forum. I often think that if you are brand-new or if you just posted your lens to the "Critique Me" forum, you probably don't want to ask to be blessed just yet. Since Angels can rank down something they think is spam or poorly-made, I think it's best to work on your lens and get some feedback from somewhere else first.

What is an Angel blessing worth?
This is one of the great mysteries of Squidoo. More recently, Squidoo added groups stats to the stats page. While going down my stats for groups, I noticed that one of my groups shows a five star rating. And yet, when you look at the groups homepages, there is no place to put a star rating. I suspect this might actually be a sign of an Angel blessing! Clearly, this is just a guess on my part and should not be considered Squidoo fact but it sure makes you want to go take another look at those stats, doesn't it?

For the heavy-duty explanation of lens ratings, see point #15 of the FAQ.
The main points of that section are...
G-rated: Any lens content that is safe for all ages and all eyeballs is considered G-rated. 99% of our lenses fall into this category. Please, no swearing, no nudity, no Adult content. It doesn't need to be Snow White and Spongebob, but it can't be four-letter or Playboy!....
R-rated: If it feels like an R-rated movie, it's probably R-rated. R-rated lenses can contain strong language and racier content, just no pornography please.
X-rated: Yep, explicit Adult content goes here. Nudity, graphic images and language, this is your spot.

What this means is that if you are registered with Squidoo, you can set your viewer preferences to allow or block certain lens ratings. Visitors who aren't registered with the site will find they get a splash screen that alerts them that they are attempting to go to a lens with some form of adult content, and it lets them either choose to move ahead or back out at that point.

Ratings and Lensrolling

- R and X rated lenses will not show up on the lensrolls of lenses that are G-rated.
- X-rated lenses will not show up on the lensrolls of lenses that are R-rated.

So, more restrictive lenses can promote less restrictive ones, but not the other way around. The bottom line is if you want the most eyeballs and the most flexibility for promoting your lenses within the site, G-rated content is the way to go.

If you want to build something more explicit, you are allowed but you have to mark it appropriately. Failure to do so most often results in someone in the community flagging your lens and the lens winds up locked.

AdSense earnings at Squidoo are paid out like this: all ad revenue is pooled and split in half. That first half goes to pay the Squid bills, etc. The other half is paid out to the lensmasters. This has changed a bit over the years. At first, all lenses were making the same amount, about $0.05 each, which raised a bit of a big stink when ad royalties were first revealed. Then it was changed to a tier system.

The original tier system looked at the ranking of a lens at the end of the pay period and determined payouts based on that last day. For example, in March 2008, here's how the ad monies paid out:

1st Tier lenses earned $8.77
2nd Tier lenses earned $4.68
3rd Tier lenses earned $1.49
4th Tier lenses earned $.08
5th Tier lenses earned $.01

Payouts of ad revenue are still done based on a tier system, however, as of September 2008, the average lensrank for the lens across the entire month is being figured for tier calculations. This method cuts out the end-of-month lensrank gaming and puts more emphasis on the overall performance of a lens.

1st Tier is approx 1-2,000
2nd Tier is approx 2,000 - 10,000
3rd Tier is approx 10,000 - 85,000
4th Tier follows but no-one is sure of the cut-off
(in the past 5th tiers were sometimes seen, but don't seem to be in play right now)

As of September 2008, the top tier paid out just over $11 per lens. 2nd tier was about $1.75.

Squidoo says their payrank system works to reward the lenses that are drawing the most traffic and interactions from visitors.

A lot of lensmasters lament the loss of Google traffic. Just go to the forums and you'll find at least one new thread a week on the topic. So if it's happening to you, a) it's not because Google is out to get you, b) it's NOT a "Google slap" and c) there are some things you can try.

The theory with the most credence is that Google gives you a bit of a boost when your lenses are new and after a while they cut you loose to fend for yourself in the ocean of traffic. So don't think of Google as a constant and don't expect what you get from them in terms of traffic to stay forever. It might... or it might not.

There has been some talk about Google and how pages are tagged and I have to say I think this might be part of the equation. When the improved stats first came out on Squidoo, everyone got to see what keywords and phrases were being used to find their pages, and a lot of lensmasters went nuts adding them to their lenses, myself included. However, many of those top words and phrases are similar repeats. And when you use the same phrases over and over, that's sometimes considered "keyword stuffing."

An Experiment I Think You Should Really Try

I've gone back into my tags and cut out a lot of the repeating words and phrases. I make sure the top three search results are being used as tags and then I try and break things up, not using the same stuff over and over. If I find some other phrases are moderately high in search usage, I'll just add the new keywords to my tags, and not the repetitive part of the phrase. I also went through my content and tried to diversify what I'm talking about, using as many different ways to express the topic as I could without using the same expressions over and over again..

What's the end result of this experiment? I'm seeing an upswing in my lost Google traffic. Really, go give it a try with a lens or two, and be sure to allow a month or so to go by and then check your results. It's not quick, but it's working for me.

There's a lot of debate about the number of times a word is used in tags/keywords before the search engines start to discredit it. I've heard 11, and I've heard 7, but what I've also heard and what I'm personally working with is 3. That's right, I'm trying not to use any single word more than three times anywhere in my tags.

There sure hasn't been this much uproar over a new feature launch in a long time, so in case you've not been keeping up with the furor over at SquidU, what I'm talking about is Squidoo's Discovery tool.

This is the second part of the colored bar that appears just below the introduction on your average Squidoo lens under the header "Explore related pages." The feature can be turned on or off from the tab in the Intro module. If you choose to use the built-in table of contents feature, this will appear just below that.

What this does is exchange recommended links across the site, picking from only those other lenses that have opted-in to using this feature. So, if you choose to "discover" you will not only have your lens display some links, but other lenses on the site will show links back to your lens too. Opt-out and your lens won't appear on anyone else's.

The main thing driving the selection of what is recommended in this section appears to be your primary tag, but other tags seem to have some influence too. Six lens URLs are shown. There are slots where the lensmaster can customize the last three of those options, specifying exactly which lenses appear.

There's a huge debate in SquidU about whether or not this feature is helping or hurting how lenses are indexed by Google. The feature first debuted in April 2008. I turned the feature on for a bunch of my lenses and off for others and just let it run that way for a few months, so that I could judge for myself how I felt about it. I revisited all the lenses in July 2008, and I can say that my lenses that had Discovery turned on seemed to really lose all of their Google traffic. Sad but true. I have now turned-off/disabled this option for all my lenses.

Some plankton for thought if you want to use Discovery:

1) If the matches appearing on your lenses are inappropriate, your options are to either adjust your lens tags, or turn the feature off. No one wants utterly unrelated lenses appearing so try playing around with your tags, but if that still doesn't work, you might really want to just skip Discovery for that lens.

2) By all means take advantage of the ability to customize those three slots it offers. Be sure to check the live lens view first, as some of your own related lenses just might be in some of those first three slots that you can't edit. You'll want to make sure you maximize your choices with this. You can also add Squidoo groups to the recommendations by typing "groups..NAMEOFGROUP."

3) I think for brand-new, just-published lenses, having Discovery turned on might help get the initial word out about them, but once a lens is in the top 50,000, I think having Discovery turned on becomes a liability. After all, a lot of the top lensmasters either don't like the look of it or feel (like I do) that it utterly kills Google traffic. What that means is that the biggest movers and shakers as far as lens-building goes are NOT using it, so you're not getting the benefit of having referrals from the best lenses on the site.