Although I don't work on my lenses these days (weeks, months) - I daily check both the official and non-official (the free one) forums. The big debate these days is the brand new lens scorecard HQ came up with. This tool is supposed to help us see the weaknesses of our lenses: too many Amazon links, too many outbdond links, too few content - we even have a "high quality content" mark.
The beauty of this lens scorecard is that it works so fine that, from what I've been able to read in both forums, it flags actual content lenses as low quality ones and considers shopping cart like lenses as high quality content ones.
The new lens scorecard even provided an EMPTY lens with a high quality content mark !
How could I trust HQ, their (highly buggy) tools and their notion of what's high quality when I witness such things (including their censorship, their closed eyes)?
So your lens can fall for low quality - for example for too many Amazon links in it - and be turned into WIP. Ok, that's better than being locked, eh. But this doesn't mean that your lenses can't end up locked.
I checked a few lenses of mine so that I could see what the lens scorecard would look like on them.
A first lens was 100% ok - oh wow ! I was surprised but the lens is actually filled with content, a bunch of content as it's my best 7 tarot spreads lens.
However I decided to make an experiment with at least one lens. I took my Ice Cream Ball Maker | The Recipe lens and saw that its scorecard was at 91% only. Though it has a lot of content I reworked it a little bit.
What did I do :
- Removing 1 ice cream ball maker product and adding its content to the one left
- Removing one entire Amazon module including ice cream bowls
- Removing one Amazon sidebar module that would include ice cream sprinkles
- Removing some clickable photo credits
- The lens scorecard went then to 100%. Published the lens.
I'll check later if the lens scorecard is still at 100%. Not sure about is since such mess happened to other lensmasters: their scorecard was at 100% and the very next day it decreased so much that these people got totally depressed !
If HQ wants lensmasters to be depressed, sick or worse, they'd rather let them know so that they can take measures an take a more or less long break from Squidoo and the mess.
Because whatever they come up with, they do it by steps: one day at a time, lensmasters rework their lenses (not me, I don't want to get depressed) and the very next day, bam ! HQ comes with something else that obliges these people rework their lenses once again !
Some of them are almost burned out ! HQ doesn't seem to realize that they are PAID for working, we are NOT paid for that !
As for me, I don't plan to let me take down, I'll never will. I won't invest all my time on Squidoo any more : it has become a thing of the past, working hard on lenses is also a thing of the past.
I'll just leave my lenses earn me money on autopilot and will move those locked whenever some end up locked - and they will. I think that the way things are going, Squidoo is losing its best assets, its best lensmasters, its best money makers and is going to stay with a bunch of useless pages that will please desperate housewives that will never click on the "buy" button.
It's going to look like a bunch of personal blogs that we can find in the billions on the Internet. Most of them having their fair share of traffic already.
The way things are handled, Squidoo looks like a sinking ship. This is the sad image I see these days.
If only they would hire some specialists to handle those problems... people who know what they talk about, what Google wants, people able to analyze the way the Web is turning.
Or better: leave people do the old fashioned way because there are millions of people who don't like change, who prefer things like they always were, people who will always keep coming to our pages because they loved what they saw, they know how we work, they trusted us.
Instead, when they head to our advises, our suggestions, they insult our intelligence, and call us "trolls" as per Seth Godin's own words.
Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66
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