Squidoo used to have what was called a “Discovery Tool”. A half a dozen (potentially) similarly themed lenses that showed up after the intro of your lens in an effort to get your reader to go somewhere else. Some liked it, many didn’t, and plenty probably didn’t know that it could be turned off (as it was a default setting on every lens, and when rolled out it was put on every existing lens).
There had been attempts before to do the same. I don’t have screenshots of them, so you’ll just have to take my word on it: A box inside the Intro Module was one attempt. The “Stumble’ arrow was another. A scrolling side tab that begged to be clicked. There may have been others, but these three stick in my mind the most.
On one hand, there are Lensmasters, who have fought hard to get back links and a Search Engine indexing.
On the other, Squidoo HQ seems to be more interested in pageviews. If they can get your visitor to visit a lot of pages (and they don’t have to be yours) then they’ve doubled or tripled (or more) their stats, which makes them look great. To potential advertisers and also sites like Alexa, who measure traffic and rank sites according to popularity (squidoo.com has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 379… that means they’re the 379th most popular website on the entire world wide web).
Can the two co-exist?
I think it can. But not at the immediate expense of the Lensmaster. Not by using methods which are a deliberate attempt to hijack the traffic.
Squidoo HQ has rolled out a new lensmaster traffic leak, a Greetbox.
As you can see in the graphic, they’ve thrown in a few short sentences explaining to the visitor how it works:
“You’re in a hurry. We know. If the page below isn’t quite what you’re looking for, try clicking the arrow to see lots more on your topic.”
Here’s what I believe they’re really saying:
“You’re in a hurry. We know. So we can understand if you didn’t use the right words to do a Google Search and it would appear that we don’t trust Google to get the results right even though they’re a multi-billion dollar company that has built its empire on the back of their search engine. So here we are trying to steal the traffic of this hard working lensmaster who managed to rank high enough in the search results for you to click on their link, so what if you’re their visitor, we’d prefer to get half a dozen page views out of you then you get to read the entirety of the lensmasters Squidoo page. So click here now!”
Do I sound bitter? Do I sound disgruntled? Do people prefer to hear me dole out Squidoo Rants instead of Squidoo Tips? Then leave some feedback and let me know what you think and how you feel!
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7 Comments
I miss the old discovery box under the intro… That was good for getting more visitors, until some spammy type people gave their lenses enormous titles & bad tags :\
Well, I’ve not seen a lot of these discovery strips because of the conditions to see them (logged out and access via Google search). That’s pretty specific and keeps most of us lensmasters pretty ignorant of what’s going on with our lenses. I don’t like that I can’t see what my visitors see. Yes, I CAN of course, but it’s awfully inconvenient to get there.
In my small sampling (one lens!) I found that the lenses I put in the discovery tool are showing up AFTER other, less relevant lenses. That made me a bit ticked off.
I really hate all these attempts to hijack lens traffic just to get more squidoo pageviews. I have disabled them every time they show up, in all the forms you mentioned.
My traffic is my traffic. If I’ve worked hard to build it, let my visitors read my lens.
Another thing is how small the lensmaster bio space is now, so more ads will fit in just under it.
I am going to make a big long image of my bio text and embed that into my bio instead, to claim back some of the sidebar. A lot of what squidoo has done lately has been at the expense of the lensmaster. This is sad.
Thanks a lot for expanding my view of what my common sense told me it was terribly wrong. I agree 100%.
I posted on the squidoo forum this:
“I’ve also been in heated debates about the discovery tool in the past. Didn’t like it when it came out, still don’t like it. ‘Sharing the love’ is all good and fine, which can be done in other ways on a lens.
The simple fact is that I have worked very hard to get my lenses showing on the search engine results.
If someone clicked on my lens from search engine results, they are interested in [b]MY[/b] lens.
Why should I give another lens a free ride on the top of my lens?
It (the other lens) wasn’t optimized more than mine for search engines, or IT would have been listed in the search engine results.”
HA! I found out how to do what Lewis mentioned in his post! You have to take any/all text off your profile. Check one of my lenses out if you want. I managed to put 3 banners I designed on the right side of every one of my lenses.
I didn’t mind the old discovery box so much but I’ve turned the new one off on all my lenses.
If it’s true that the average visitor views 5 pages on the site then I’d rather they see the ones I lead them to.
I usually make my lenses in groups so I use the Featured Lenses module a lot. I also lensroll related lenses that I like.
All of my outside links are set to open in a new window so visitors can easily return.
I figure I’m giving Squidoo plenty of page views without them sending my readers to another lens before they’ve even read my intro module.
I actually liked the discovery box, because most of the time it was filled with more of my own lenses. But if the point is to get the reader to go to more and more lenses, that doesn’t really help the individual lensmaster. We have yet to see the revenue from these new ads also, so have no way to know how much they will pay out. Sort of keeping my mind open at this time.