There is something wrong with the new algorithm

The latest Top 100 by LensRank really looks very strange - it's so hard to find there any interesting lens with great content and layout. Instead, it is dominated by lenses on handbags, tattoos and free downloads.

Yes, free downloads appear to replace the videosense and affiliate marketing lenses. There are about 30 of them - about downloading music, videos, psp games, movies, etc.

I noticed that new trend while looking in the morning at the current ranking. In fact, I got shocked - all of my lenses went down and I had no lens in the Top 100 by LensRank!

I would accept that, because it is possible with growing competition, however I realized that on every lens the update date was described as: "Updated more than a week ago"!

It wasn't true, because I updated all of them 2 days before and the actual date was being showed correctly on the Dashboard. I sent a bug report and got confirmation of receipt, but nothing happened during the day - the update dates didn't change (only after I updated the lenses) and the LensRanks were not corrected.

A number of people were complaining in the Lounge, so I decided to do some analysis of the current situation in the Squidoo rankings.

The results were shocking!

Imagine that profitability is no longer the most important factor. I have never had any problem with it being a significant ingredient in the LensRank formula because Squidoo needs revenue in order to exist, we want to earn money for the charities and we also want to be rewarded for our work.

However, after this tweak, only 24 (!) lenses from Top 100 Most Profitable are also on the Top 100 by LensRank. This is much, much lower than before. I think it's a bad decision, because Squidoo will get less money for charities and lensmasters will not be rewarded as much as before for being creative to find ways to earn money. It simply will have discouraging effect.

But, I did even more analysis and I found Gil's new magic ingredient... His silver bullet this time is traffic!

Yes, by looking at the less known Top 100 Most Visited (most traffic) - http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses/traffic I found out that 67 - i.e. every two out of three lenses from that list - made it to the Top 100 by Lensrank. It obviously means that that the latest tweak gives the biggest importance to traffic.

I think it is not acceptable, because it is one of the factors that can be very easily manipulated and we had examples of that in the past.

I'm still waiting for full response to my bug report as apparently something was wrong and all of my ranks were lowered because of that. By the way, a look at the Dashboard also confirmed that the traffic is very important now, as my lenses (all updated on the same day) were listed in the reverse order based on the traffic for the last 7 days.

Ilona Zuzalek
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