The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 116

Here's the standings for Week 116:

1 - Seth's Blog - 8,838 (-164)(LW - 1)
2 - CopyBlogger - 5,936 (-264)(LW - 2)
3 - Chris Brogan - 2,218 (+74)(LW - 3)
4 - Search Engine Guide - 1,387 (-38)(LW - 4)
5 - Logic + Emotion - 1,240 (-66)(LW - 5)
6 - Duct Tape Marketing - 934 (-12)(LW - 6)
7 - Influential Marketing - 823 (-58)(LW - 7)
8 - Daily Fix - 683 (-45)(LW - 8)
9 - Church of the Customer - 661 (No Change)(LW - 10)
10 - Six Pixels of Separation - 651 (+10)(LW - 11)
11 - Brand Autopsy - 630 (-63)(LW - 9)
12 - Techipedia - 583 (-28)(LW - 13)
13 - Conversation Agent - 561 (-68)(LW - 12)
14 - Jaffe Juice - 550 (-25)(LW - 15)
15 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 546 (-33)(LW - 14)
16 - What's Next - 461 (+4)(LW - 16)
17 - Damn! I Wish I'd Thought of That! - 450 (-1)(LW - 17)
18 - Diva Marketing - 441 (+3)(LW - 18)
19 - Every Dot Connects - 411 (+10)(LW - 23)
20 - Social Media Explorer - 410 (+2)(LW - 22)
21 - The Viral Garden - 407 (-22)(LW - 19)
22 - Converstations - 405 (-5)(LW - 21)
23 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 404 (+5)(LW - 24)
24 - Techno Marketer - 380 (-8)(LW - 25)
25 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 376 (-50)(LW - 20)


A reminder that the Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of sites/blogs linking to each, according to Technorati. The number you see after the blog name is how many sites/blogs Technorati claims have linked to the blog in the last 6 months. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many links the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

If you're scratching your head and wondering how the hell your blog lost another 60 links this week, you're in good company. Over half of the Top 25 blogs lost at least 20 links this week. Which either means that the marketing/social media blogosphere is imploding, or that Technorati is proving to be as reliable as Twitter during a Steve Jobs keynote.

Which is making me seriously consider switching to another metric/site for ranking the Top 25. I've been tracking Technorati long enough to realize that if most blogs lose 50 weeks suddenly this week, that TRati will 'add them back' next week. But the problem is, the readers which stumble upon THIS week's rankings might see that Blog X lost 50 links, and think it's cause the blog sucks, not because of a likely TRati hiccup. And of course, we've previously discussed that so much linking is done OFF blogs these days, and TRati doesn't catch any of that.

So now the question becomes (he groans as he writes this), what would replace Technorati? Ideally, I would like to use the Feedburner subscriber counts, but unfortunately, only 11 of the current Top 25 blogs display this information on their blogs. If anyone knows of a site that collects this info, that might be a solution. I just dont want to switch to FB counts and then have to tell bloggers that they'll have to add the count widget to their blog in order to be ranked.

And if you'll recall, I stopped basing the Top 25 on Alexa because of reliability issues with the data it was reporting, and now we are back to the same place with Technorati. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them, but ideally I would like to rank the blogs according to ONE metric, simply because I honestly don't have time to collect data from 2 or 3 different sources and then add em up and spit out a ranking from all that mess.

No new blogs this week, and the next update is next Wednesday.





Next update is next Wednesday.