In the long tail, we are all read
I have occasionally been wondering about the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. For example, when I look up the data for this blog,
the outgoing links page shows a whole lot of other sites arranged in a
spiral with the principle of "the closer to the center of the spiral,
the more links the blog gets". Well, I do remember linking to "No Speed Bumps" maybe once
in my life and even that was several months ago, yet it sits at the
center of the spiral. On the other hand, sites that I am pretty much constantly linking to, such as Steve Sailer, Tjic, Mangan's Miscellany or Asymmetrical Information, are out there in the fringes of the spiral. Interesting.
The results for my incoming links are equally... strange. It would always be nice to see who links to my posts, but I guess not. If anybody has any suggestions of a free service that provides this functionality, give me a hint in the comments. Of course I can't complain since I don't pay anything for this service, but I do have to wonder how, if there were bugs in the code, they could reveal it. It's not like they have some gold system that they could compare their results to. Ah well, at least Google seems to have finally repaired its index so that it now finds more than ten incoming links to my blog with the search "link:sixteenvolts.blogspot.com".
Speaking of comparative rankings and visitor counts, when I did some of my tabu searches through the blogosphere a while ago (expand your horizons by only going to sites that you have never before been to), starting from the higher levels of the ecosystem, I occasionally took a look at the SiteMeter counts of the blogs that I checked out. For starters, it was pretty strange how the daily visitor counts could vary tremendously so that one blog gets maybe a hundred visits a day whereas another one gets thousands, yet both blogs are ranked pretty much the same in the TTLB Ecosystem. Apparently, it doesn't make much difference for your rank how many visitors you actually get.
Then again, it might be smart to ignore visitor counts too and only count the incoming links. For example, in the blogs that sit near the top levels of the Ecosystem, whenever I have checked out the SiteMeter counts and especially its referrer pages, a very significant portion of their visits seem to originate from hits from various Google searches. When I look at my SiteMeter referrer page, perhaps about five out of fifty most recent visits come from Google, but at the top blogs, this ratio is much higher and it seems like almost two out three visits come from a Google, Yahoo etc. search.
What is clearly happening here is that following the power law distribution, the top blogs get to have so many incoming links that Google calculates them to have a very high PageRank. This in turn makes these blogs show up high in the search results for pretty much any words that have appeared in the individual posts or their titles. So the vast majority of these hits are totally spurious, unless you try to tell me that the vast majority of people who read blogs do so through Google searches. (Google Blog Search results are of course genuine hits, but they don't seem to be very common.)
A second issue to note here is that the top blogs tend to have a large number of commenters, which will then artificially balloon the visitor counts. For these two reasons, I would take the visitor counts of the top blogs with a slight grain of salt.
The results for my incoming links are equally... strange. It would always be nice to see who links to my posts, but I guess not. If anybody has any suggestions of a free service that provides this functionality, give me a hint in the comments. Of course I can't complain since I don't pay anything for this service, but I do have to wonder how, if there were bugs in the code, they could reveal it. It's not like they have some gold system that they could compare their results to. Ah well, at least Google seems to have finally repaired its index so that it now finds more than ten incoming links to my blog with the search "link:sixteenvolts.blogspot.com".
Speaking of comparative rankings and visitor counts, when I did some of my tabu searches through the blogosphere a while ago (expand your horizons by only going to sites that you have never before been to), starting from the higher levels of the ecosystem, I occasionally took a look at the SiteMeter counts of the blogs that I checked out. For starters, it was pretty strange how the daily visitor counts could vary tremendously so that one blog gets maybe a hundred visits a day whereas another one gets thousands, yet both blogs are ranked pretty much the same in the TTLB Ecosystem. Apparently, it doesn't make much difference for your rank how many visitors you actually get.
Then again, it might be smart to ignore visitor counts too and only count the incoming links. For example, in the blogs that sit near the top levels of the Ecosystem, whenever I have checked out the SiteMeter counts and especially its referrer pages, a very significant portion of their visits seem to originate from hits from various Google searches. When I look at my SiteMeter referrer page, perhaps about five out of fifty most recent visits come from Google, but at the top blogs, this ratio is much higher and it seems like almost two out three visits come from a Google, Yahoo etc. search.
What is clearly happening here is that following the power law distribution, the top blogs get to have so many incoming links that Google calculates them to have a very high PageRank. This in turn makes these blogs show up high in the search results for pretty much any words that have appeared in the individual posts or their titles. So the vast majority of these hits are totally spurious, unless you try to tell me that the vast majority of people who read blogs do so through Google searches. (Google Blog Search results are of course genuine hits, but they don't seem to be very common.)
A second issue to note here is that the top blogs tend to have a large number of commenters, which will then artificially balloon the visitor counts. For these two reasons, I would take the visitor counts of the top blogs with a slight grain of salt.
Perhaps Technorati Search is what you're looking for.
http://www.technorati.com/search/
Cheers,
Posted by Blair Hansen | 7:25 PM
That is because NoSpeedBumps sits at the center of the universe.
Posted by Dan Morgan | 10:40 PM
Dan: I guess that is then pretty undeniable. I'm certainly not saying that your site is bad in any way, just that I haven't been linking to it.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 1:24 AM
i think the ecosystem rankings are based on links you get from other blogs on their front page. In other words, if I have a link to you on my front page, that gives you one point. This means that sidebar links increase your score long-term, while a link in a post increases it until the post moves to the archives.
TTLB Ecotraffic is what ranks you based on number of hits, but only if you have a publicly accessible sitemeter counter (i.e. you let the pulic view your statistics).
Posted by Glaivester | 10:35 PM
I don't have trackbacks turned on, so I wasn't aware that you were linking to me (or even reading me). Thanks so much! I'm honored!
It's time for me to return the favor!
Posted by TJIC | 2:38 PM