Last week I posted two of my sites for sale so as to be able to focus on broader ones that would include the two topics of the sites I sell. For one I got an offer from someone but it was not a purchase. Instead I now partner with the potential buyer and we both manage the site. The other will be posted for sale later on. Fingers crossed for the price to be reached and the site to be sold to someone who will care.
Before doing so I'll have to go check my webmaster tools out first, delete all bad backlinks if there are any and sell the site as a clean baby.
But anyway, today's post relates to the strange lensrank behaviors experienced on my Squidoo account.
As I said earlier, I planned on deleting all lenses that would not get traffic. Zero traffic lenses were thus deleted provided that:
- They were evergreen lenses,
- They did not make sales,
- Their traffic stats were stuck at zero (or 1-2 visits/week) for a certain amount of time.
That is how I ended up with 87 featured lenses - 1 WIP and anther WIP that has never been published.
Note that I did not delete lenses that would have at least 5 visit/week!
That is where the fun starts. I deleted all those lenses. As of today I have deleted 120+ lenses in total. Strangely these past weeks I noticed a new trend : zero traffic lenses are back!
So let's say that I deleted 14 zero traffic lenses, these were the pages that did not get a single visit in several weeks. To be honest, I must admit that I also deleted some seasonal lenses. Those that did not perform in their matching season (Mardi gras lenses for example).
As a matter of fact, although previous years my Mardi Gras lenses used to perform pretty well, this year they did not get the deserved traffic. The Venetian Carnival did, though. Anyways, Mardi Gras lenses will be moved to my holiday site.
So when I was finished with the lens deletion, all 87 left lenses did have traffic. However, 15 of them now have NO traffic at all any more. How strange is that?
When I cleaned up my account, I kept ALL lenses that would get visitors. So what happened to those lenses?
How on Earth pages that would get traffic for an entire year, whether seasonal or not, would end up with NO traffic at all once all non performing pages on my account would have been deleted?
Another thing I noticed recently is that sales do not have the same impact on lensrank that they had before. In the past for as long as lenses did make sales, they would be ranked higher than others for some time - generally some days if not a whole week.
Nowadays, when lenses do make sales, their rank increases slightly but not as much as before on lensrank update; then the very next day, they get back to where they were before the sales.
Seems that there have been some changes in lensrank factors and that the weight of sales, and therefore those that bring in money for Squidoo as a whole, do not deserve to have their lens rank higher for longer as it was before. What are now the main factors for lensrank.... well seems that internal traffic counts more than anything else.
But what does internal traffic only bring to Squidoo? Internal traffic does not bring money, therefore, does not benefit the community.
See you later for another Squidoo post... It's been payday yesterday.
Posted by Holly Day
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