Wednesday, August 06, 2008

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 117

Here's the standings for Week 117:

1 - Seth's Blog - 8,660 (-178)(LW - 1)
2 - CopyBlogger - 5,800 (-136)(LW - 2)
3 - Chris Brogan - 2,296 (+78)(LW - 3)
4 - Search Engine Guide - 1,324 (-63)(LW - 4)
5 - Logic + Emotion - 1,240 (No Change)(LW - 5)
6 - Duct Tape Marketing - 895 (-39)(LW - 6)
7 - Influential Marketing - 825 (+2)(LW - 7)
8 - Daily Fix - 652 (-31)(LW - 8)
9 - Church of the Customer - 661 (No Change)(LW - 9)
10 - Six Pixels of Separation - 643 (-8)(LW - 10)
11 - Brand Autopsy - 612 (-18)(LW - 11)
12 - Conversation Agent - 551 (-10)(LW - 13)
13 - Techipedia - 546 (-37)(LW - 12)
14 - Jaffe Juice - 530 (-20)(LW - 14)
15 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 529 (-17)(LW - 15)
16 - Damn! I Wish I'd Thought of That! - 449 (-1)(LW - 17)
17 - Diva Marketing - 430 (-11)(LW - 18)
18 - What's Next - 395 (-66)(LW - 16)
19 - Social Media Explorer - 412 (+2)(LW - 20)
20 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 406 (+2)(LW - 23)
21 - Every Dot Connects - 405 (-6)(LW - 19)
22 - Converstations - 402 (-3)(LW - 22)
23 - Techno Marketer - 380 (No Change)(LW - 24)
24 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 372 (-4)(LW - 25)
25 - The Viral Garden - 356 (-51)(LW - 21)


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.

Another blogosphere-implosion happened this week, according to Technorati, with another 18 blogs losing links, and only 4 gaining. I've started paying more attention to my links and how this blog gets its traffic over the last couple of weeks, because I'm honestly wondering if all these blogs are losing links because TRati is borked, or because TRati only counts links from other blogs in its 'authority' for each blog (which is also borked).

What I've noticed is that Twitter and Plurk are the top referring sources for traffic to my blog, after only Google (search queries) and direct traffic. And much of that traffic is coming from links that myself or someone else has shared that pointed back to my blog. But unfortunately, Technorati doesn't count any of those links.

Also, my blog's traffic and feed readers are currently at an all-time high. And as you can see, my blogs links, according to Technorati, are dropping like a rock. I've also started paying more attention to the blogs that have subscriber counts listed, and I'm noticing that most of them seem to be seeing their counts rising, while their link counts, according to Technorati, are falling. BTW, 16 of the Top 25 blogs now have Feedburner subscriber counts listed on their blogs.

So what do you think? Do you think Technorati is accurately counting the number of links your blog has? I'm finding it harder and harder to justify keeping it as the measurement source for the Top 25. It was a bit iffy to begin with that it was only measuring one metric (blog links), but now that so many links are being shared on social sites, and not blogs, it makes it even more unreliable, I fear.

And if I switched the Top 25 to using Feedburner subscriber numbers as its metric of choice, do you think that would improve the Top 25 as a resource? The only problem would be that bloggers would need to add the Feedburner subscriber count chicklet to their blog if they wanted to be considered for the Top 25. But that's a relatively simple change to make. Would especially like to hear what readers that don't have blogs listed in the Top 25 think about possibly switching to Feedburner subscriber counts.

Otherwise, there are new blogs this week, and the next update is next Wednesday.





Next update is next Wednesday.

3 comments:

Chris Brogan said...

I've heard tell there's a link "aging" process that happens, such that older links no longer count and Technorati reduces you. If you don't have new hot stuff, you start to lose authority/ranking. That's what I thought.

By the way, watch for next week. : )

Mack Collier said...

Chris, Technorati only counts links from the last 6 months. So if the counts are accurate, that means that most blogs in the Top 25 are now getting fewer blog links than they did 6 months ago.

Which is entirely possible, since a lot of the linking activity is shifting to Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, and other sites. That Technorati doesn't count. So it could be that the links to our blogs are actually UP, but that Technorati thinks they are going down, since they are only counting links from other blogs.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure, but Technorati has always been sporadic for me.

Given your expertise, I wonder if it would be a good idea to, instead of displaying the Top 25 Marketing blogs per Technorati, to highlight the top 5-10 corporate blogs according to the Mack Collier Score™ (or maybe just the top 5-10 you looked at this week).

Maybe it isn't a ranking scale at all, but rather just a general "Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down" overview.

As you said, a lot of the links these days are coming from Twitter and the like, which is eroding the authority of the T'rati method.