Technorati, Blog Rankings, & Top Bloggers on "Communities"
As many fellow VOXers know, there is no way to tell how many hits your blog gets (or how many people read or talk about it)... Six Apart doesn't provide a counting utility to bloggers. (If they did, the bloggers generating the most traffic on VOX might be tempted to leave to start revenue generating blogs of their own.) I often wonder how many people actually read my blog, besides those that add me to their VOX "neighborhood" or leave comments. As far as I'm aware, no one has developed a way to accurately automate the combined measurement of blog traffic, quality of content, links from other blogs, etc. Technorati does a good job of identifying who is talking about which bloggers, so for now, it is what I use to gage how I'm doing in the blogging universe. But, Technorati only tells part of the story.
This morning, I took a look at the rating of my blog on Technorati. When I first checked the rating score several months ago, my blog was ranked somewhere around 900,000th. The next time I checked it (weeks later), it jumped to around 300,000th. This morning when I looked (gasp) it jumped to the 125,511th top blog. That's over 700% improvement! Unfortunately, that's not at all impressive when you explore what it means. Technorati's rating score indicates that socialmedia.vox.com was linked to by 52 other bloggers 30 times. The more bloggers that link to this blog, the higher my rating score goes.
When I dug a little deeper into who was talking about my blog, I realized that the links to my blog included:
- Legit mentions from other blogs (though there was a duplicate mention, which counted twice - both the original post and then the archived, permanent post).
- People who added me to their VOX neighborhood (My hyperlinked image appears on their vox home page.)
- Multiple links from fraudulent blog sites... By this, I mean links from websites formatted to look like blogs but lacking in their own content. Take, for example, "MySpaceRIP.com". (I won't hyperlink the URL because the undesired result would be an improvement in Myspacerip.com's Technorati rating.) This appears to be a holding page for a domain name for sale + advertising space for sale.
If any of you out there know of a better tool than Technorati for measuring the impact and popularity of blogs, please post a comment or, if you're a non-voxer (and can't leave a comment), email me, and I'll post your comment manually.
Comments
Six Apart's more professional TypePad product has built in mechanisms for monitoring traffic, allowing users to add modules, advertising, linking, etc. In this case it's more about choosing the product that makes the most sense for what you are doing. Vox tends to be more casual (building a neighborhood of friends and being able to control privacy rather gathering random eyeballs) whereas people using Movable Type and TypePad probably care more about the base metrics.
Google has a rating service as do several other entities. Todd & rates marketing blogs, for example. What is important is the relative position where your blog stands rather than the specific number. Mine is in the mid-300ks. It debuted at the 1.5 million level about Thanksgiving on Technorati. Anyway, what is missing from your post is that there are over 55 million blogs out there. Were our blogs on Typepad, for instance, your (and my) rating would probably be much higher. As it is, if you work the numbers, you are probably in the top half-percent of all blogs. A few bogus or double entries would make a zit on a mouse's butts difference. Enjoy where you are at and don't give another thought about who does a better job of ratings - that would only be of consequence if you were blogging with the idea of getting high ratings.
The latter, Paul.