Developed Squidoo Lenses Go WIP?

A few days ago, something on my Squidoo dashboard caught my eye: A few of my lenses no longer had a green check mark next to them. That meant they were considered WIP by Squidoo, or “Works In Progress.”

Officially, lenses with less than 3 modules are considered “unimproved” or WIP.   When a lens is WIP, it doesn’t show up in Squidoo searches or categories. It’s hidden behind a virtual curtain, so search engines aren’t going to be able to find and index it. (Unless you have other websites and blogs linking to it.)

WIP was implemented to help cut down on spam lenses. You know, the junky sites that lack original content and were just tossed up in hopes of snagging some quick traffic or AdSense revenue.
The thing is, my lenses were developed! They should have been OK according on Squidoo’s rules. So what’s going on here?

Well, it turns out that traffic also has a big role in lens rank. The lenses of mine that went WIP weren’t getting any hits, so Squidoo decided not to feature them any more.

Ah, but it’s not even as simple as that. Lensmaster “MnM” claimed to  have lenses that are 300 visitors a week from Yahoo, but none from Google. Yet these thriving lenses were thrown into WIP status. Even after adding more modules and sprucing them up, they sunk lower and lower in rank.

It’s starting to sound like Google traffic plays a huge role in how well a lens does. Then it becomes a Catch-22: You need Google traffic to avoid WIP status, but if you don’t get indexed by Google fast enough, the WIP curtain falls and Google won’t be able to find you through Squidoo.

Tags: google, wip