Set in Style

In yesterday’s post, I discussed two rating services — Alexa (for Web sites) and Technorati (for blogs).

Let’s consider how they come up with those numbers (rankings) that tell us how popular is a blog or a Web site.

Alexa rankings are based on how many people visit a Web site, and how many pages they view at the site. The data is collected from people who’ve installed the Alexa Toolbar in their browsers, and “from other, diverse traffic data sources.” Says Alexa, the data “is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.”

According to Alexa, the most popular sites are Yahoo, Google, and YouTube.

Technorati rankings are not based on how many people visit a blog, nor on how many posts they view at the blog. Instead, a blog’s rank is based on blog reactions – i.e., how many other blogs linked to it in the past six months.

I just checked the most popular blog of all — The Huffington Post. It has over 300,000 blog reactions. The Volokh Conspiracy has over 15,000, Set in Style has 32, and Sheppard & Mullins’ China Business Law blog has 11 blog reactions.

There is no direct correlation between a blog’s Alexa rank and its Technorati rank, but a blog that many visit is likely to have more blog reactions than a site that few visit. For instance, The Huffington Post has an Alexa rank of 630, and a Technorati rank of 1, while The Volokh Conspiracy has an Alexa rank of 52,000, and a Technorati rank of 413.

____________
More on Sheppard & Mullins’ China Business Law blog later. Right now, let’s look at how someone could fool Technorati — i.e., get a better ranking for a blog than it deserves.

Click here to see just how popular is the Bank Lawyer’s Blog. Right now, it has 291 blog reactions, which is absolutely outstanding for a blog that has an Alexa rank of 1,344,000.

Note that many of the blog reactions to the Bank Lawyer’s Blog come from some other blog titled — believe it or not — the Bank Lawyer’s Blog. So far as Technorati is concerned, these are two different blogs (since they have different URLs), even though one is a copy of the other.

The copy was set up to fool Technorati — to make it seems as if the original was getting lots of traffic.

That’s not all. Many of the blog reactions to the Bank Lawyer’s Blog are from Law Bites, and posts from the Bank Lawyer’s Blog appear as posts in Law Bites.

That’s to fool Technorati.

So there are at least two sites that have no more purpose than to make another site — the Bank Lawyer’s Blog — seem far more popular than it really is.

____________
And what has any of this to do with Sheppard & Mullins’ China Business Law blog? Tune in for our next episode of “On Getting Noticed” to find out.

This entry was posted 17 October 2008 at 9:03 and is filed under Blogging, Twittering, Etc., Modern Marketing Materials. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.