Squidblog

Squidoo was founded on recommendation. Real people making real, authentic recommendations about the best stuff online. The biggest part of this, of course, is the content you stick in your lens. The more curated, handbuilt and genuine the lens is, the better we’ve seen it perform.

Same goes for how you promote your lenses. When you create something worth talking about, and cultivate permission to market to people, and develop your content based on feedback, and dozens of other quality human interactions, your lens benefits. Why? Because, if they like it, people spread it for you.

If you aggressively promote a lens to someone who doesn’t want to hear from you, though, well, that’s spam. If you harass bloggers, that’s spam. If you email lensmasters or join Groups begging for lens ratings, that’s spam too. These actions are no better than fool’s gold–undiscerning lensmasters mistake it for the real thing.

In the past few weeks we’ve seen some otherwise good lensmasters chasing after fool’s gold, trying to promote their lenses via massive rating swaps. “I’ll give you 5 stars if you give me 5. I’ll lensroll you if you lensroll me.” Ugh. It’s one thing to ask your friends to check out your lens and offer feedback. It’s another thing to be a swapper. [History lesson: It's 2000 all over again, when blogging converged on ubiquity, and at the same time lost credibility in places. Bloggers went so nuts with link exchanges and blogrolls that they undermined their own editorial content. The people who focused only on the good stuff, and on real promotion... those are the ones who stuck].

Squidoo does not endorse or recommend ratings swaps. Not only because it’s not in the spirit of the site, but also because it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t earn you loyal readers or customers, it doesn’t help people find you in search engines, and it doesn’t increase the quality of your content. That, and it’s risky. A star rating is only a tiny factor in our LensRank algorithm right now. You’re not going to win with even 500 fake ratings. And, in fact, if you spam people asking for them, you’ll assuredly lose.

Finally, remember: Squidoo reserves the right to change our LensRank algorithm at any time. We’re currently working on (unannounced) changes that will end up impacting swappers without warning. Building a so-called business on massive rating swaps or traffic exchanges could mean you did a whole lot of work for a whole lot of nothing.