Squidoo Rankings and Review - Feb 2006

Since Squidoo’s launch, I’ve been experimenting with different type of lenses. Now that some are near their 90 day point, I thought I’d provide a non-scientific review.

I’m happy to say that as of today three of my eleven public lenses are rated in the top 100. Surprisingly, SuperBowl XL Ads is still ranked 21st. My other seasonal lenses like Top 10 2006 and Christmas Beers and Ales have fallen to 6,805 and 9,020. Both of these were in the top 100 during their season. So the conclusion is that seasonal lenses can do very well. Reviewing these a year from now will be interesting. Another thing I learned is that renewable seasonal lenses need a generic lens as well: See SuperBowl Ads which will become a listing for future annual lenses.

Sudoku has had the best ride on Squidoo and it is ranked 21st. With Squidoo’s launch, it got picked up in a few blogs and was both a “poster child” and a dart board for the concept of lenses. So unit recently, it was always in the top 10 of lenses. A real benefit is that the lens continues to provide a regular traffic to my AllSudoku.com sudoku games site. It is not clear what the drop in ranks means though the change in how rankings are calculated makes a deference. It may also be that the Sudoku fad is fading.

My Sony Ericsson w600i lens has steadily moved up in ranking to where it is now 63rd. I think that the Squidoo format was a good fit for this topic. And this is becoming a popular cell phone.

My other lenses are basically going unnoticed. Vienna, Virginia, Dave Winer, Love Monkey and McLuhan are in the 2,500 to 5,000 range. It didn’t help that the Love Monkey TV show was cancelled after its third epsisode. And Dave Winer has not linked to the lens I created about his work. But more importantly for Squidoo’s business model is my lenses have less than 10 inbound links.

Overall, I still like Squidoo lenses. I’ve really enjoyed some that others have created and I’ll write those up later. Also, I think that tagging is working which surprises me. I believeSquidoo needs to involve lens readers more. Perhaps digging lenses is need. Or comments. Something to make it easy for readers to explore another lens.