SquidBlog » Blog Archive » Shaking up the Bestsellers

SquidBlog » Blog Archive » Shaking up the Bestsellers: "At Squidoo, we’ve decided to shake things up a little. (Not that we suggest you shake your cream or milk containers.)

LensRank (how we determine a lens’s popularity) will still be based on the same formula, measuring things like traffic, click-outs, reader ratings, inbound links and affiliate sales. But now we’re going to change when that formula is calculated. On Monday we’re going to introduce a 14-day rolling window.

Which means what, exactly? Well, that our lensrank calculations will be done using data from the past two weeks, rather than looking strictly at a lens’s lifetime of publication. That will ensure that the freshest, timeliest and most actively updated lenses aren’t trumped by the lenses that perform well because they’ve been around longer. Squidoo is still rewarding the exact same qualities, but we’re tossing the grandfather clause out the window.

So, heads up that you might see some interesting changes in ranking this week. No, it’s not an accident. Yes, your lens can still rise to the top. Now that we have more than 13,000 lenses, the competition is getting a little stiffer!"

Squidoo: Lens on Lens

This lens is quite different than my other lenses:
it is really a personal journal, rather than a traditional Squidoo Lens.
It contains some personal views on Lens design, construction and promotion.
I am using it to record some of the design criteria I have tried, used or abandoned in attempts in the very early beta stages of Squidoo. Hence the title "Lens on Lens."

Some Ideas are likely to have wide spread applicability (indeed some that I used very early on were discoverd by others independently ... for example use of internal links to specific modules within a lens) while other (especially those being used in the Massive lenses I have developed (which in some ways seem to be the antithesis of the Squidoo concept) may not prove viable in the end....

If you are considering building your own lens, it may be useful to follow some of the pointers to other resources... even if you don't choose to use any of my techniques, there is a lot to be learned from the resources I point to.