It’s not very sophisticated, but it does what I need right now. It’s always useful to see how the lens rankings go up and down. Makes it easier to see what you need to work on.

I would love to see your spreadsheet, I’ll send you my e-mail address. My family gets a chuckle out of my spreadsheet — it just tracks number of visits to each of my lenses but it is better than the scrap I was using at first.

Brenda

I have a list of my top lenses in the first column, the next column is for today’s rankings, the next for the day before etc. Each day I insert a new column in front of the previous day’s.

The ranking for each lens is color coded, green if it went up, red if it went down.

I also added columns at the end to compare yesterday with Saturday and today with Saturday to see the net effect of the change in the algorithm.

And the whole thing is filtered, so I can sort any column by lensrank.

Very easy to maintain, but it was intended to help me see trends. If a lens is dropping, then I need to see why, maybe tweak it or promote it.

But when they drop by so much, there’s really not much I can do…

It doesn’t sound as if you would be interested, but if you or anyone else is, I would be happy to send a copy of the spreadsheet. It’s not rocket science or that pretty – well not yet! It just helps me see things a little better.

Maybe at some point I will consider adding graphs of the trends if I think it worthwhile. It’s a good learning exercise in Excel if nothing else.

Other than that: I feel your pain.

No I’m not about to quit, but you know there are some of us who are here to try and make money, some of us struggling still to find the answers, and to think that your efforts could be made almost worthless just – well you know…

Like so many others here, I have a full time job, don’t have nearly as much time as I would like to work on my lenses, I enjoy what I do, I enjoy making friends and seeing the other wonderful lenses that people have created, but although I do enjoy it, I have to try and focus my efforts on areas that will make me money, and to think that things might be changing here just dragged me down yesterday.

I guess we will have to wait and see what happens with lensrank today.

Having had my top 26 lenses plummet by a minimum of 350 places, 3 of them by more than 20,000 places, it’s just very disheartening. I don’t see right now how any adjustments to the algorithm can bring things back in line before the monthend.

And then the spammers – finding that there are a number of spam lenses in the top 2,000 and even more in the top 10,000, are they going to take our income?

Well I guess I need to cool back down and wait…
Hoping my daily lensrank Excel shows some green (upward moving) lenses today. Yesterdays showed 26 lenses in red.

I remember reading early on that the people who succeed online are the ones who learn how to do things efficiently and I can certainly say that the biggest barrier I feel is that I don’t have the time to do all the stuff I need to do to “succeed”. I also think support is important to keep you going. Maybe your GF can help support you and you can get “excited” together about building this business?

Meanwhile, I am hoping that Squidoo eventually adjusts the tiers as the number of lenses we compete with grows. Getting a top tier lens will continue to become more difficult. Top 1,999 isn’t so hard with only 200,000 lenses out there, but now it’s over 500,000 and soon may be over 750,000 and so forth.

You obviously have made a lot of friends online and I wouldn’t give up just yet. Overtime, I have to think the success that many people experience is due to the number of others who support them, follow them, blog about them etc.

You’re an outstanding lensmaster and eventually I think that will pay off.