Yellow and Red Are The New Squidoo Lens Colors This Season

Well, it is not quite that bad, but the axe did fall on some of my lenses.

 I had about 13-14 yellow warning lenses as the new filters scanned my lenses and didn't like some of them. At first I was working blind while trying to improve them, but later some HQ posts educated lensmasters on some of the ways to improve the yellow flagged lenses.


 The surprise for some of them was over using keywords too often. Changing keyword density helped some of them pass and get their green OK check. After all this time online, I still don't fully understand keywords, although I am slowly learning. So I changed lots of heading words and for some lenses that was it, for others there is still a problem. I added much more content and that pulled some out of the warning zone.

 It was helpful to know that there is approximately a 60% content to 40% sales percentage. Of the original problems I have fixed half of them.


 Red Lights
 Today some of my lenses dropped into the red zone again. They keep giving me trouble, I'll have to figure out a way to make them better.

 One is Candadian Humor of Red Green. Either the idea that he is Canadian, or more likely, the fact that he isn't at his zenith and not many know of him make this a lens that regularly drops off the published list.

The other is the Trabeculectomy, which is mostly a small information lens.

 The other three lowest lenses (to round out my bottom five) are:
Holiday Celebrations
Deck The Halls At Christmas
Make A Homeschool Unit Study

So...we knew it was coming and now there is a lot of updating and improvement work to do.

Listing Squid Angels

 Small Update

I am at a crossroads. I loved the idea of listing all the Squid Angels who have blessed my lenses, but the cold reality of keeping up with lots of lenses, trying to visit as many lenses as possible, keeping up with quests... well, you know what I'm going to say, "It is becoming too time and effort intensive to list everyone".  In order to be fair, I may have to take those areas of my lenses down. Right now I am undecided, I still reciprocate all the the visit I can and try to find one or more of the lenses to bless.

Bottom Five and Code Red

In ER, code blue means the patient is in deep trouble, but on Squidoo it is code red- red status of a published lens going into the red zone. I just had one drop into there again: Franz Liszt seems very unpopular.

What are the Bottom Five of my Lens Listings?

1. What is white?
2. Family Holiday Recipes
3. I Love Winter
4. Advent Traditions
5. Ilona's Garden Lenses

Three are Christmas related, so that doesn't surprise me, but the garden lensography is proving troublesome... it keeps landing in the danger zone. so there must be something someone doesn't like, because I have linked it .... oh well, back to the drawing board.

Whenever something I write is unpopular, I try to discover why and improve it- usually I just attempt the "pig in a poke" method, and adjust things in a completely random sort of way. Maybe I should work on the keywords, which I never have really understood....

My Three Worst Lenses and My One Big Mistake

I have had some published lenses drop in rank, so they went into the abyss called the WIP red bin. The "Works in Progress". A couple managed to be yanked back up into featured and rank status, but one still languishes in the badlands of the backend of my Squidoo account.

The Notorious Three (as of today)

1. Garden Lensography
2. I Love Winter
3. Best Cookie Recipes

I am not going to say they don't deserve to be lowly and ignored, just that the first is in the red and the others are in danger. After all, it is nearly Midsummer and no one feels like thinking about Winter or Christmas right now. And the garden lensography is more hopeful thinking. Although I have a fair amount of garden lenses so far.

What about that huge mistake I made? Read about it (the whole story) right here....
in my Squid Journey, Big Mistake. I call this my live and learn category. The story of my life is that I make lots of mistakes, but I work hard to learn from them. One that I need to remember (I am kicking myself as I write this- not an easy task) is the Bible verse: "abstain from all appearance of evil". If something is even close to breaking the TOS of a site, even if you mean well and don't intend to actually do anything wrong, it might bite you, and people don't have to be nice and gracious to you. But the people at Squidoo are very nice and they mostly just want to create a quality site, which benefits us all.

The bright note (to raise the level of the mood here) is that I nominated my best lens for LOTD. Doesn't hurt to try right?

I hope this post doesn't manage to dooce me. It shouldn't but I don't seem to have my bearings in this particular community just yet. Still a newbie.