I also feel like bragging, although I am actually a little surprised at one of the purple stars I just found in my inbox. It’s not my best lens. I suppose it’s unique content, though!

So here are all my Purple Stars and other Squidoo awards, plus a few personal benchmarks for which I am proud.

The Purple Stars

• Make a Fancy Table of Contents (5.29.09) I put a buttload of work into making this tutorial beautiful as well as useful.
• The Great Blizzard of 1978 (11.16.09) Just a fun lens about a piece of history I lived through.
• Convert Your Prius to a Plug-in Hybrid (11.21.09) Who found this?! It’s one of my oldest lenses, a somewhat dated report on the very first commercially-available kit to turn a regular into a plug-in hybrid.
• Greekgeek Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found ( I think and hope this lens and its 2 sequels have helped a lot of new Squidoo lensmasters.
• How to Make a Pyramid Kite (12.9.09) Woot! I first built this webpage in ’94 as a cool “here’s something I know — use it!” gift to the web. I’ve always been proud of this lens, despite its simplicity.

The Lens of the Day(s)

The first one was nominated barely two weeks after I started on Squidoo, and is still the cornerstone of my Squidoo presence. The second one is a rare case in which I self-nominated, but I had a good reason: (a) Jackie Robinson Day was coming up and (b) the lens donates its earnings to his charity, so I was eager to get it in the spotlight.

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal (Lens created 5.5.07,  Made LOTD on 5.17.07)
• Jackie Robinson: An American Hero (Made LOTD in early April ’09)

Ancient Greece Odyssey also made 5th place runner-up for Lens of the Year 2007, and won Best Travel Lens in 2008. It has also been reviewed by several lensmaster blogs!

Giant Squid Community Showcase

• Funny Signs and Bizarre Billboards As so often, I had no idea this lens had been nominated until I noticed the traffic stats sending me fresh traffic. This would’ve been September ’08.

Top 100 Lenses

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal 220 days in the Top 100, currently at 91.  Best rank: #3.
• Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found 200 days in the Top 100, currently at 61. Best rank: #8.
• SquidU Lensmaster Lounge Help 72 days in Top 100, currently 1111. Best rank #29.
• Make a Fancy Table of Contents 50 days in Top 100, currently 3094. Best rank #3.
• Volcanoes Are Hot Stuff, 31 days on top 100, currently 7503. Best Rank: #31.
• Jackie Robinson: An American Hero 36 days on Top 100, currently 8500. Best Rank: #6.

As you can see, about half my “Best” lenses are Squidoo-related, but I’m happy to see that half of them are simply on topics I’m passionate about. Although really I’m such a CSS Addict that “Fancy Table of Contents” counts, too.

Random Traffic and Ratings

• Ancient Greece Odyssey lifetime visits: 19160 (adding all the other chapters, it’s about  40,000). 200 ratings.
• Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: 20193 lifetime visits, 826 ratings.
• Funny Signs: 26307 visits, 28 ratings. LOTS of search engine traffic, even though I knew nothing about SEO when I made it!
• How to Make a Pyramid Kite: 19797 lifetime visits, 15 ratings. Another pre-SEO lens that just happene to grab keywords.
  
• Fancy Table of Contents: only 4600 visits, but it was made 7 months ago and has 258 ratings!

Okay, that’s enough stats. I’m not so interested in pay, but if you want to know more about ALL my lenses and stats, see Greekgeek’s Squidoo Stats for pay days and breakdowns of my lenses from best to worst.

She doesn’t give earnings, just her lens tier breakdown. 40 lenses in the top 2000 out of 120. FORTY. That’s
one out of every three of her lenses earning top dollar. AND they’ll be earning lots of Amazon commisisons, on top of ad revenue!

I have been aware of and lensrolled or featured some of Pastiche’s lenses on clipart, but that figure still knocked my socks off.

It’s worth taking the time to stop and admire Pastiche, and observe her secrets to Squidoo success:

1) Cover a niche very well, with lots of lenses devoted to seasonal and specific topics within that niche.
2) Make well-organized, attractive, easy-to-use and easy-to-read lenses.
3) Target keywords like crazy so you get a lot of traffic for specific searches. Don’t just have a lens on clipart. Have a lens on clipart for vintage hearts, or John Deere Tractor clipart, or squirrels.
4) Clickthroughs. Oh my gosh the clickthroughs. Nearly everyone coming to her lens is LOOKING for something, and almost certainly will be clicking on some of her links because she gives EXACTLY what she promise to give with the lens title and opening blurb.
5) Amazon modules that target her reader’s wishes and needs exactly. It’s one thing to promote items related to your lens topic. It’s another thing altogether to target a particular audience that is desperately wanting the thing you offer, and will be quite likely to buy it.

She’s identified a corner of the web for which there is a steady and unrelenting command, and provides a service so that lots and lots of people looking for it will come to her. I know from my own lens on where to get free graphics that there’s a bottomless demand here, but I haven’t really done much to monetize or follow up on that. Pastiche has!

Of course, since she’s cornered the market on clipart so well, the answer is not to try and target the same niche, but to apply Pastiche’s winning Squidoo strategy to another niche– one that’s wide open.

Hats off to you, Pastiche!

Now I’m going to finish up with an in-depth look at the “individual lens stats” part of the Squidoo Dashboard.

Squidoo Dashboard – Individual Lens Stats - “Summary” Tab

• Age: Do old lenses get a lensrank boost? Probably not; I can’t see any convincing reason for it, and Squidoo tends to encourage fresh and new content. Microsoft and Google give some bonus to domain age, but I’ve only seen people who know even less than me speculating that webpage ages may help. Anyway, Squidoo itself is barely old enough to qualify for such a boost.  So just give yourself a pat on the back as lenses hit milestones.
• Ratings: As I said in the first part of my analysis of the Squidoo Dashboard, my guess is that Squidoo isn’t counting the actual rating of lenses, because most get zero, one or 5 stars. However, the FAQ mentioned “community ratings” as a factor, so I’m guessing they measure number of ratings. (We’ve also been told not to fret over one-star ratings, because they still boost lensrank. Thank you to whomever gave me a birthday present a day early by 3-starring (?!) a whole bunch of my lenses today! )
• Lensrank: It’s not just an ego massage; lensrank serves several practical functions. Even if they’re not in the top 100, lenses get listed in order by lensrank when someone uses Squidoo search. So if your lens is top-ranked among lenses sharing its tags (and they are reasonably popular tags to search), then you’ve search engine optimized for a very particular search engine: Squidoo! Likewise, getting onto the Top 100 List for any category means it will get extra attention/clicks from people browsing Squidoo. Moreover, all Top 100 Lists are indexed by search engines and give a small SEO boost, whereas Tags pages are not.Say what? Here, a crash course in how search engines see Squidoo:
  • Visit a lens. Click on a tag in the sidebar. You’ll be taken to a page where all other pages with that tag are listed. If you have the NoFollow/DoFollow Firefox add-on, it appears that Squidoo Tag pages are “followed” by search engine crawlers, which index the web by following links. But not so fast! If you check Squidoo’s robots.txt file, you’ll see that all pages in the /tag/ directory are blocked from search engines. (Geeky geek stuff here, yes.) Whereas Top 100 pages, all filed under /browse/, are NOT blocked!  Lenses on Top 100 pages get a guaranteed visit by search engines.
  • Which means it’s worth your while to make lenses in less-popular categories. Don’t cheat, folks — mis-categorizing a lens means fewer human visitors will find it! But you might check out less popular categories and brainstorm lens ideas for them.
  • Oops, digression. Where were we? Ah yes, examining the “Summary” page of Squidoo lens stats.
• Clickouts. One big measure of a page’s performance is whether people found something on it to click, or hit the “Go Back” button. This is what industry experts call conversion: turning web traffic into something you want the visitor to do.
• Squidoo cares about four kinds of clickouts: Adsense/ad clickouts (ka-ching!), merchant clickouts (possible ka-ching!), clickouts to the rest of the web, and clickouts to other parts of Squidoo. According to a trusted lensmaster post I’m still trying to track down—Fluffanutta, was that you?!— directing traffic to other parts of Squidoo may get a bit more lensrank boost. After all, once you send people away, Squidoo gets no more benefit from them. Betcha “ka-ching” clicks (money-earning) carry more weight, though.
  (Suddenly I have this image of your readers as a volleyball, internal links as passing the volleyball back and forth around Squidoo, and Adsense and affiliate sales modules as the spike. Moving on…)
• Number of times lens has been emailed. I have a strong hunch that this is one of those “lensmaster reputation” or “other factors” the FAQ mentions in breaking down the lensrank algorithm. Notice how Squidoo remembers all the times your lens has ever been emailed!
• Number of times marked as Favorite. It might be time to get Fluffanutta’s Love This Lens widget which compactly invites people to favorite, rate, email your lens… all things that probably or definitely boost lensrank. Smart guy. (Get and use ALL his Squidoo tools, for that matter. They’re more useful than my yapping.)
• Days on Top 100 list probably isn’t factored into lensrank— although who knows!— but it’s a fun goal to shoot for.

Below this header we have two timelines:

So, seven-day traffic isn’t all Squidoo cares about, anymore than we do. Ditto for lensrank. It’s possible that Squidoo may factor “average traffic”  or just “lifetime traffic” to lensrank, although if so, I doubt these are as important as big lensrank boosters like earnings,  (7-day) traffic, (30-day) clickthroughs. (The part in parentheses is the span which Squidoo records on the stats page, which I suspect is also the span Squidoo measures for lensrank calculations.)

Squidoo Dashboard – Individual Lens Stats - “Traffic” Tab

This is, in my opinion, the nuts and bolts of what Squidoo is looking for: the vital signs of lens performance, which changes a lot from day to day (hence daily lensrank calculations).

At the top of the “Lens Traffic” page it repeats 7-day and lifetime Visitor Traffic. 7-day is again listed first. Maybe I’m reading too much into these stats, but I keep being struck by Squidoo’s “yesterday is so last week” attitude.

Then a bunch of charts come up. By default they’re 7-day, but when monitoring keywords I advise taking a look at 30-day windows to get a better sense of what keyword phrases are getting searched repeatedly.

Example Squidoo Dashboard Traffic Source charts:

Don’t you love Long Tail* searches? They make me laugh. This example also points to a “long tail chasing” secret: people often type the word stuff in searches.

*(Long Tail: less-popular searches that collectively outnumber popular searches. You can often get most of the traffic for a “long tail” search that no other webpage is optimized for, whereas popular searches are hard to dominate. A graph of search results for nearly any word shows where the nickname“Long Tail” came from.)

• Incoming traffic: Remember SquidU’s thread about whether Squidoo used backlinks as the biggest factor for lensrank? Here’s why I doubt it. Squidoo stats don’t mention how many inbound links (one-way links pointing to your website) or backlinks (properly, reciprocal links between your page and another page) you’ve got. Instead it measures traffic sources: sources of traffic that sent actual visitors to your page. In other words, Squidoo measures performance, not potential.
• The Traffic Source pie chart is careful to distinguish each different kind of traffic source. Do you have traffic from one search engine? Or several? What do you want to bet there’s a minute lensrank boost if you have a colorful “lots of sources” pie chart versus just one source? In other words, it’s worth your while to have links from other parts of Squidoo and beyond it, from several search engines, and from your friends to whom you gave your business card with the URL on the back.
• Keyword searches measures exactly how many different searches landed on your page. Again, what do you want to bet that lots of different searches may give a lensrank boost? It’s worth your while to learn how search engines other than Google work. (See my “SEO” tab up top— I’ve got links to a couple articles discussing optimization for Yahoo and MSN.)
• The Keyword Tool (little plus signs on the chart above) encourages you to add commonly-searched phrases to your lens tags. I’m of several minds about this. Because of the Tags page being Nofollow), Squidoo tags don’t give you any link building SEO juice— see Fluffanutta’s rant about “Squidoo Tags Have No SEO Benefit”. And Google doesn’t treat Squidoo tags as any more significant, for search optimization purposes, than any other link text. However, it turns out that Yahoo and MSN do consider your tags to be extra-important parts of your page, and they’ll boost your page higher on searches for those terms! So I use broad, general terms for my Squidoo tags as Spirituality recommends, at least at first, but later add recurring “long tail searches” that keep popping up. (Fluffanutta says Squidoo’s “health check tool” likes no more than 10-15 Squidoo tags, and sometime I need to find out whether there’s a good reason for that limit).
• Note the Direct category of incoming traffic. This is people’s own bookmarks, clicking on a link in email, or any source of traffic that didn’t start out on a traceable webpage.  (People using online webmail get filed under Referral, not Direct). I suspect Direct traffic is factored into the “lensmaster reputation” or “other factors” lensrank boost mentioned by the FAQ. If someone likes your site enough to come to it personally, that’s gotta count for something. So email your friends your best lenses!

Below these two charts we’ve got a much more detailed breakdown of Referrers:

The gray box only appears if you click on a referrer’s domain name. I’m going to hazard a guess that the number of different domains sending you traffic is counted for lensrank in addition to number of

• Finally, we’ve got the “conversion” part of the Stats page: Clickouts (often called clickthroughs). All clickthroughs are listed together: to other sites, to other parts of Squidoo, to adsense ads, to merchant modules. So I think we’re looking at a straight lensrank factor here: Total number of clickouts. Possibly with an extra boost for clickouts on several different links on your lens, instead of just ten clicks on just one. Bottom line, tempt your visitors to click. Preferably on links to lenses you’ve made that are closely related to your topic, using link text that fits your page’s keywords, to help with SEO.

• Last but by no means least, you’ve got the Royalties tab, which I personally wish were named the Commissions tab. This tracks all the commissions you’ve gotten from people buying stuff through your Amazon and eBay modules. I think you’ll also see Cafepress commissions pop up there. We know from the FAQ that Revenue boosts lensrank. Each time you make a sale, lensrank goes up. I’ve not seen any relationship between amount of sale and lensrank boost, but I’ve only got a small sample size.

And That’s IT.

There are three Squidoo Dashboard Tabs I’m ignoring here: Comments, My Groups, My Profile, My Favorites.

However, other than my guess that you may get a slight lensrank boost for answering comments, these tabs don’t have much in the way of data relevant to measuring lens performance. I seriously doubt Squidoo rewards you for adding a lens to more or less groups, though you’ll get another benefit — backlinks — thereby.

In closing, I’d just like to remind you to check your profile to make sure you’ve filled in as many blank slots you can: blogs, favorite lenses on this and that, any opportunity you can get to pass a little link juice to some of your lenses.. Change your featured lenses from time to time, to keep your bio fresh and to distribute traffic and backlink love to different lenses.

There’s another possible source of official lensrank information right under our noses: the Squidoo Dashboard. I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Squidoo is not expending great gobs of computing and hosting power calculating and storing lens stats for our sole benefit. Most of these stats measure factors alluded to in the FAQ. I suspect that most if not all of our Squidoo Dashboard stats are lensrank factors. We don’t know which carry the most weight, and the lensrank algorithm changes from time to time, but dashboard stats tell us a lot about what Squidoo, at least, thinks is important for an effective webpage.

So let’s dig deeper and see what the Squidoo Dashboard has to tell us.

First (although many of us forget, since we set the “Lenses” tab as default), there’s the dashboard’s Daily Digest:

Squidoo Dashboard – Daily Digest Analysis:

• Squidoo is always pushing us to make more lenses. The Giant Squid program (mentioned below this header) is one way they push, and you’ll see others if you read the Squid Blog. It’s not hard to guess why: every lens is another tentacle for catching web traffic, another source of SEO-worthy links to other parts of Squidoo, and another source of ad revenue. The message is: Get WIPs featured; fine-tune them later.
• Traffic is the second thing mentioned— not just any traffic, but seven day traffic. Which means, if you’re lazy and pragmatic like I am, you may not want to do much social bookmarking when you first publish a lens. You’ve already got the “brand new lens” freshness boost, so just draw a little traffic to it via Twitter, an announcement in SquidU forum, pinging with SquidUtils, activating the Discovery Tool, and your signature. Optimize for search engines and do enough to get indexed, but don’t worry about capturing every traffic source at launch. Instead, save most social promotion for when lensrank starts to drop. Each social promotion method may produce a flurry of new visitors. If one seems to be working, hold off a few days before pulling the trigger on the next.
  (On the other hand, this may be a short-sighted way of looking at it. Boosting lensrank is usually not your primary goal; gaining traffic and conversions — clickthroughs, sales, or whatever you want visitors to get out of your webpage — is usually goal #1. You’ll have to weigh the benefits of “traffic from the start” vs. “new bursts of traffic arriving later”. Either way, temporary bursts of traffic are exactly that, temporary, so you’ll want to balance short-term and long-term methods of building web traffic.)
• Earnings (commissions from Squidoo modules that “sell stuff”) are mentioned as lensrank factors on the FAQ. Based on personal experience, I’d say they’re one of the biggest factors. I’ve seen my most dramatic lensrank jumps from sales.
  Caveat: That may be due to the fact that I don’t target or get many sales on my “selling stuff” modules. People often think the “biggest lensrank factor” is the one they’ve under-utilized in the past, because “new” sources of lensrank boost can cause a big jump. And on the third hand, I think lensrank factors are strongly weighted by the following rule of thumb: if it helps Squidoo grow and prosper, chances are, it will be rewarded by Squidoo!
• Pending Comments may simply be a useful reminder for us. But the last thing the FAQ mentioned as a lensrank factor was “curated” lenses. Perhaps one indication of “curated” is not how many comments we get, but when we last attended to them, or maybe how often. I certainly saw a huge lensrank jump when I came back from a several-month hiatus and cleared out my comments queue, although that may have been because I edited all those lenses. It would take carefully-controlled testing to determine whether comment moderating actually impacts lensrank and how. I simply raise the possibility.
• Below my screencap, four blocks on the page focus on two stats: the top and least trafficked lenses, and the freshest and most stale. Traffic, freshness, and number of lenses get emphasized again and again. I would not be surprised if the top four lensrank factors were: recent traffic, time since last update, pending earnings, and clickthroughs, with frequency of updates factored in separately.
• Finally, there’s a reminder about the Giant Squid program (even if you’re a giant Squid). This reminds us that number of lenses (also mentioned at the top) counts— but only after the Giant Squid quality control program makes sure you don’t have buckets of junk lenses. So, once you’ve passed a human screening, “lots of lenses” gives your lenses a lensrank boost. Making the Giants 100 Club earns an additional “lots of lenses” boost. Therefore: make lots of lenses, but make sure they’re good, then apply for Giant Squid-dom.

Squidoo Dashboard – Lenses Tab Analysis:

So much for Daily Digest. Turning to the Lenses tab where most of us do our stats obsessing, we get: Rank, Rating, Visits, $$$, Edited.

• The FAQ mentions “community ratings” first, and they’re the first thing on the dashboard. Number of stars may not be very significant; I suspect the “number of stars” count is a legacy of early Squidoo, when they hoped people would be more selective about rating lenses from 0 to 5 instead of 0, 1 OR 5! However, I note that on individual lens stats, number of ratings is also recorded. As as I mentioned in the last post, there are a lot of clues that Squidoo hunts for and will suspend people found manipulating ratings. That tells me that “community ratings” are still very important, even if the exact number of stars may no longer count for much. So if you want to boost lensrank, add a friendly reminder to visitors to rate your lens.
• I’m skipping over Visits because we obsess over traffic too much, except to remind confused newbies that it’s a 7-day summary of your most recent traffic,  not a cumulative count of all past and recent traffic.
• $$$ again reminds us that whether we earn through third party affiliate marketing or don’t care about money, Squidoo’s got to consider the bottom line. Boost your lensrank by pointing your visitors to intriguing Amazon or other e-commerce modules and using personal recommendation to make the sale.
• Edited pushes us to keep “curating” our lenses. The FAQ has said frequency of updates is important, and we have also got a lot of evidence that time elapsed since last update is important. I’ve heard but not confirmed that there are “lensrank drops” at certain fixed intervals, e.g.  30 days since last update, 60 days since last update. Remember you can click the top of a column to sort lenses by that statistic. That makes it easy to find and update stale lenses.

Squidoo Dashboard – “Stats” Tab Analysis

• Individual Lens Stats. We’ll examine these in more depth in the next section.
• Earnings. The bottom line. Bookkeeping between us and Squidoo for our records and theirs. Could historical earnings data for lenses have any bearing on current lensrank? Maybe not; Squidoo has to record this stuff for other reasons.
• Referrals. On the one hand, referrals from a lens may give it a small lensrank boost. On the other hand, in two years and dozens of referrals, I’ve yet to see any referral translate into earnings (I’ve heard a similar complaint from a lensmaster with hundreds of referrals). You would be the apple of Squidoo’s eye and stand to gain bonus money if you could figure out why so few referrals translate into actual earning and contributing lensmasters (most never make a single lens). You might check referrals’ bios from time to time and give encouragement to them, although I confess I’ve only done that once or twice (and then found most had not filled in profiles or contact info).

Last but by no means least, each lens has three pages of individual lens Stats.

But this post is getting so long I’m going to break it into 3 parts. Okay? Okay. Stay tuned for Squidoo Dashboard Secrets Continued.

Tier chasing or lensrank chasing is a bit like a dog chasing cars — there are better moving targets to focus one’s energies on, and why does it matter?! But that car bumper is very shiny.”

—Greekgeek, in SimeyC’s SquidU thread “Lensrank Buzz”

Lensrank has been a frequent topic of discussion in SquidU lately — more than usual, I mean.

I feel ambivalent about lensrank. I’ve seen a lot of internet communities in which post count, forum ranks, join date or some other arbitrary system gets used to gauge a member’s worth.

Except that lensrank measures something more meaningful than mere post count. It’s an attempt to gauge lens worth, so that low-content lenses get pushed to the back row and exceptional lenses get to shine. That’s a necessary quality control loop on a site where anyone is allowed to submit content. Lensrank also yields benefits worth chasing. The highest-ranked lenses get extra search engine and visitor exposure on Squidoo’s multiple “Top 100” lists. Squidoo’s search box, almost the only way to navigate the site, returns results by lensrank.

Finally, of course, lensrank determines payout. Even though I want to keep Squidoo as a fun hobby, I can’t help fiddling with my lenses just below a payout tier cutoff! I track my Squidoo lensrank and payout stats each month. Yes, the bumper is shiny.

So let us examine this shiny bumper. Just what is lensrank based on, and… more importantly for you folks, I’m sure… how do I keep 10-20  of my lenses in the Top 2000?

While Squidoo has to keep the lensrank algorithm secret to head off people gaming the system,  the Squidoo FAQ actually lists many of the factors used to calculate lensrank:

We look at community ratings, lensmaster reputation, clickthrough rates, frequency of updates, inbound and outbound links, revenue generated, and lots of other factors and give the lens a number.

“[...]LensRank does a full sweep of all lenses in the Squidoo system and ranks them according to things like frequency of update, traffic, inbound and outbound links and more. We recalculate the rankings every day or so. [...] LensRank is built to reward human-made, updated, curated lenses.”

I knew my training in literary analysis would come in handy someday. So, let’s translate!

• It may be significant that frequency of update is mentioned twice. Perhaps not, but it’s a reminder that frequent updates, not only the time since last update, is what Squidoo measures. Of course, that probably just means that each and every update gives a boost. Note also that Google counts “fresh content” as significant on at least some topics (Which does not include RSS feeds or any script-generated content on a lens).

• Community Ratings means the gold stars at the top of lenses. No wonder the FAQ has a section on Fool’s Gold, and the Squid Team periodically issues stern warnings about lensmasters being suspended for ratings manipulation, which could lead to their being devoured by mutant lemons. Smart lensmasters don’t cheat! However, I think it’s perfectly cricket to remind visitors at the bottom of a lens to jump back to the top and rate. Here’s basic “back to top” code: <a href=”#”>[link text]</a>

• Lensmaster reputation must mean the number of fans in one’s fanclub. Like ratings, you could remind visitors to favorite your lens, but be careful about asking your visitors for too many favors. I like to give them four options: Tweet, Stumble, favorite and/or rate, as opposed to the mass o’ social bookmarking buttons some people use.

• Clickthrough Rates are big. My clickthrough vs. “back button” experiment didn’t yield specific enough results for me to report how big the clickthrough lensrank boost is, but that’s just as well, since I don’t want my data getting anyone in trouble with Marty the Mutant Lemoen. I’m guessing that clickthrough boost is proportional to lensrank — otherwise a 5000 point lensrank boost could send a top tier lens over the event horizon into negative lensrank! At any rate, the point is to MAKE YOUR LINKS SHINY, and do what you can to earn clicks.
  I do this by monitoring the search queries in my traffic stats tab not so much for tag optimization — my lens must already be optimized for those phrases at least somewhat, since I’ve got visitors from them! — but in order to fine-tune my links. You want clickthroughs? Link to what visitors are looking for! Preferably, link to another lens which you’ve built to address the most common searches showing up in your traffic stats.

• Inbound links (also mentioned twice) have generated another flurry of discussion in SquidU. Some argue that backlinks are important, particularly since Squidaholic borrows the Yahoo tool to count them for you. (Actually, nobody on the Backlink Bandwagon thought to bring up that point, but you won’t tell them, will you?)
  I don’t think Squidoo counts all the links that Squidoo members fling about the web like so many styrofoam peanuts. For one thing, Squidoo doesn’t want to be penalized for endorsing link-spam! For another, there’s no accurate tool for measuring backlinks; Yahoo’s tool is approximate at best. Instead, I suspect that Squidoo notes how many different inbound links have yielded actual visitors. Or, to rephrase the “tree falling in a forest” paradox, “If a spammer drops a link on a random webpage, and nobody clicks it, does it count for lensrank?”

• Outbound links, (aslo mentioned twice), probably aren’t counted as the number of links on your lens, but rather, how many different links on your lens get clicked.
  I have also heard — probably from The Fluffanutta, who knows the inner workings of Squidoo more than most of us because of his work on SquidUtils — that links passing traffic to other parts of Squidoo are weighted more than outbound links sending visitors away from Squidoo. (This makes good business sense.) The question is whether the same is true of inbound links!
  At any rate, that brings us back to  for driving clickthroughs.

• Traffic is obvious, although too many newbies treat it as second only to lensrank in importance. Important, yes, but the dashboard and the FAQ post we’re analyzing suggest many factors, not just a few, play a role. Shameless plug time: Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found.

• Last and possibly most important, the FAQ sums up the Lensrank algorithm by saying: LensRank is built to reward human-made, updated, curated lenses.
  In other words, change your module titles and text from the default! This also suggests that using the magicbuilders for Squidoo’s co-brands may hurt lensrank if you don’t bother to expand or alter the content that Squidoo’s scraped for you (e.g. the Wikipedia excerpt in SquidWho lenses).  User-submitted parts of your page may also play a part. Finally, “human-made” could mean that using “keyword searches” to fill in the content of various modules like Amazon may not be as important to lensrank as picking your own products.
  There’s no way to tell which of my guesses is right, but the take-away lesson is: Squidoo’s lensrank algorithm has built-in ways to reward you for creating original content, so as to help original lenses rank better than unimproved lenses. Take advantage of this boost!

Remember, Squidoo occasionally adjusts its algorithm to address new trends and nix the techniques used by “cheaters.” We have only a vague idea which of these factors carries the most weight. And FAQs aren’t always kept up-to-date. So use this post to help you better understand lensrank, but don’t sweat it if you haven’t “lensrank optimized” for all of the above factors.

Believe it or not, this is not all I have to say about lensrank! Stay tuned for Part II: Lensrank Secrets Right Under Your Nose.

Related Links

My “Training wheels come off” SquidU post about what causes lensrank drop