SPITBULL

Thursday, January 15, 2004

RANKULARITY

I've been thinking about what factors make a particular blog important. We bloggers tend to think about these types of things, in our free moments between reloading site statistics "like the proverbial rat getting his cocaine pellet." So I've come up with these:

1. Referrers (the sites that link to the blog). Yeah, everyone seems to agrees that a blog with more referrers is a bigger deal than one nobody links to but this approach is simplistic and encourages link-whoring. Obviously, the "quality" of the referrers matters. A site that is linked to by the InstaKahuna is likely to be more authoritative than one served by the long-since abandoned blog of an anti-social diarist. The way to tell whether you've got yerself a quality referrer site is to take a peek at its traffic meter.

2. Link click throughs. If vistors actually click on a blog's links this means they find the posts worth delving into. If they explore the blogroll they're probably interested in the blog's opinions of which sites are valuable. (Or it could mean they're lazy and see an easy way to get to a blog they meant to visit anyway...)

3. SpitbullPedigree (what can I say, there's a rule that lists like this always come in threes). Whether the blog links to or is linked from Spitbull. Over the top compliments get extra point here. Self-explanatory.

It seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to use these factors in a ranking system: give a blog "credits" equal to a portion (10%?) of the traffic of each of its referrers. (Both Google and Daypop sort of do this now, but they share "PageRank" and "Daypop scores" downstream rather than just traffic. Google needs to buy Sitemeter!). Add to that "credits" for each blog link a visitor clicks through. Then give the site credits for its own traffic. I'm open to suggestions on how to figure in the Spitbull connection. Hey Google! Truth Laid Bear! I'm talking to you!

POSTED BY Eloise | 12:30 PM | # |