How do you measure a blog’s success?

Brazil correspondent Gabriela Zago looks at the variety of metrics for evaluating the popularity of blogs. A Portuguese language version of this is available here.

There are many ways to measure a website’s success. Some use a more quantitative approach, and others are more qualitatively based. You can say a weblog is popular for many reasons, such as:

traffic (page views, visits, visitors),
discussions (comments, trackbacks, linkbacks),
position in search engines (page rank),
readership (feed subscriptions, blogroll presence) and
reputation (a more subjective approach, based on what people think of a website, and the qualifications of the person that writes for it).

If you obtain all that data and construct rankings based on these different types of information, chances are that not all blogs ranked will appear in the exact same position in each one of the ranks.

And there’s more: you get a high probability of being contested on the method you’ve chosen to rank all the sites. Since no rank is perfect, one partial solution is to analyze how websites behave when evaluating different aspects.

Let’s take Adrian Monck’s Top 10 UK Journalism Blogs based on Google Reader subscriptions. Last year, on November 7th, the ranking appeared as follows:

#	Blog	Google Reader subs
1	Roy Greenslade	194
2	Paul Bradshaw	165
3	Shane Richmond	119
4	Robin Hamman	73
5	Jemima Kiss	66
6	Andrew Grant-Adamson	65
6	Martin Stabe	65
7	Richard Sambrook	61
8	Seamus McCauley	49
9	Simon Waldman	46

As of March 29th, including Adrian Monck’s blog, the results had changed as follows:

Google Reader subscriptions – it includes subscriptions using other Google products, like iGoogle and Orkut

#	Blog	Google Reader subs
1	Paul Bradshaw	441
2	Jemima Kiss	318
3	Roy Greenslade	296
4	Martin Stabe	208
5	Simon Waldman	164
6	Shane Richmond	156
7	Robin Hamman	128
8	Richard Sambrook	107
9	Adrian Monck	86
10	Andrew Grant-Adamson	80
11	Seamus McCauley	79

The same methodology shows a different ranking. Things changed over time? Readership is a fluid concept?

There’s more. If you take these 11 weblogs and rank them based in other factors, the order changes drastically. First, let’s take a look on the ranking based on Bloglines subscriptions (all results based on March 29, 2008, and for a sum of all feed addresses founded for each weblog): subs

Bloglines subscriptions

#	Blog	Bloglines subs
1	Robin Hamman	183
2	Simon Waldman	179
3	Roy Greenslade	164
4	Paul Bradshaw	152
5	Seamus McCauley	117
5	Martin Stabe	117
6	Richard Sambrook	113
7	Shane Richmond	79
8	Jemima Kiss	63
9	Andrew Grant-Adamson	44
10	Adrian Monck	27

We can find some problems in measuring feed subscriptions… First, not all feeds results are publicly displayed – if you use FeedBurner, for example, you should opt-in to make them public.

Another problem is that, usually, a weblog has multiple feed addresses. Sometimes they ask readers to subscribe to a particular RSS feed, but other options are presented for those who try to add it directly to feed readers. So, measuring a weblog’s success based on only this information could be tricky…

A similar problem of having multiple feeds arises when we check the ranks for blogs that have changed their address recently. Inlinks are split into more than one address (and this is particularly interesting when the old content is duplicated into both addresses), which leads to a fragmentation of authority and positioning in rankings of all sorts.

However, it is relatively easy to regain popularity, especially if you promote your new address effectively. Technorati authority, for instance, only counts inlinks received within the last 6 months.

Really old inlinks aren’t taken into account when calculating a blog’s authority. The only thing that is lost are the dynamic links (links pointing to blog entries) that are lost. But they are only taken into account for a short time.

If you check onlinejournalismblog.com, onlinejournalismblog.wordpress.com and ojournalism.blogspot.com rankings, for example, you’ll see that the difference in rankings is very large from .com to .wordpress, and ever larger from .wordpress to .blogpost, or .com to .blogspot. It’s hard to imagine they were once the same blog.

And what if we check popularity among search engines? Google PageRank is calculated based on inlinks a webpage receives. For the same 11 blogs, results are as follows:

Google Page Rank

#	Blog	PageRank
1	Roy Greenslade	7*
1	Jemima Kiss	7*
2	Shane Richmond	6*
2	Robin Hamman	6
2	Andrew Grant-Adamson	6
2	Martin Stabe	6
2	Simon Waldman	6
2	Adrian Monck	6
3	Paul Bradshaw	5
3	Richard Sambrook	5
3	Seamus McCauley	5

Does this say much? Does it really matter to have a slightly higher chance to appear first in search engine results?

If we check Alexa rankings, we see something curious:

Alexa Rank

#	Blog	Alexa Rank
1	Roy Greenslade	751*
1	Jemima Kiss	751*
2	Shane Richmond	1,392*
4	Paul Bradshaw	552,667
5	Robin Hamman	764,442
6	Martin Stabe	809,242
7	Seamus McCauley	1,338,910
8	Adrian Monck	1,378,867
9	Richard Sambrook	2,011,427
10	Simon Waldman	3,090,867
11	Andrew Grant-Adamson	6,646,643

Weblogs located at traditional media websites (Like Guardian.co.uk) share the same rank as the root website – that’s why they appear first on the list.

But Technorati authority, for instance, seems to be calculated based on only the blog’s inlinks…

Technorati Authority – based on links from different blogs in the last 6 months

#	Blog	Authority
1	Jemima Kiss	602
2	Roy Greenslade	397
3	Paul Bradshaw	377
4	Shane Richmond	246
5	Robin Hamman	175
6	Adrian Monck	131
7	Martin Stabe	123
8	Richard Sambrook	107
9	Seamus McCauley	104
10	Simon Waldman	67
11	Andrew Grant-Adamson	40

The number of links pointing to a blog can vary a lot, too…

Google Results – links from any web page (which inclues, for example, links in a blogroll – that appears in every page of a blog)

#	Blog	Google Results
1	Roy Greenslade	4,520
2	Jemima Kiss	3,030
3	Martin Stabe	2,300
4	Robin Hamman	1,850
5	Adrian Monck	1,770
6	Paul Bradshaw	1,690
7	Richard Sambrook	1,360
8	Seamus McCauley	937
9	Shane Richmond	863
10	Andrew Grant-Adamson	860
11	Simon Waldman	808

The final list was calculated based on the aforementioned aspects (Bloglines subscriptions, Google Reader subscriptios, PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, Google Results and Google Blogsearch results).

Every time a blog position was #1 in one of those aspects, it got 10 points. 9 points for position #2, 8 points for #3, and so on. The results are a sum of these points. And yes, Guardian and Telegraph blogs have been privileged since their PageRank and Alexa Rank are calculated based on the root site.

#	Blog	“Blog Authority”
1	Roy Greenslade	64*
2	Jemima Kiss	58*
3	Paul Bradshaw	53
4	Robin Hamman	52
5	Martin Stabe	44
6	Shane Richmond	42*
7	Adrian Monck	29
7	Richard Sambrook	29
8	Simon Waldman	28
9	Seamus McCauley	24
10	Andrew Grant-Adamson	13

But why measure website success? The data can be really useful for the site owner, for example, in order to get to know their audience and then be able to create content directed to them.

After all, we’re writing for humans, not for search engines – although some people really invert the sentence and prefer to write for Google, whereas some others do not pay attention at all to their readership and end up talking to nobody.

*Guardian and Telegraph blog rankings include PageRank and Alexa data based on the root site’s popularity rather than the individual blog.