End link doping now!
Many of you reading this are no doubt quite aware of The Truth Laid Bear and the “ecosystem” it uses to rank weblogs. Essentially, the greater the number of links leading to a particular blog, the higher said blog appears in the ecosystem. Now, this method of ranking is not all that different from the one Google employs when determining which websites appear at the top of a given search result page, nor is it necessarily a bad way to organize what can only be described as an incredibly unwieldy and disjointed body of information. Certainly, the number of people linking to a given website seems like a pretty good indicator of the site’s influence and popularity, so a high ranking in N. Z. Bear’s not-so-little directory has understandably become one of the most prized recognitions in the blogosphere.…
Article comments
26 - spacemonkey
Erik,
Relax, no one's out to get you,
that you know of.
27 - Sobriquet Magazine
Spacemonkey,
I am chuckling now even as I double-bolt my door... :)
28 - Jeremy
To point out a small bit of blogsophere trivia, if you wanted to actually SAY instalanch, or malkinlanche, or whateverlanche it would be insta-launch, like a rocket..which is where your traffic goes.
Something many of the really heavy hitters have on their side is public exposure. Glenn has been on T.V. several times. Markos Zunigas (Daily KOS), Michelle Malkin and others get massive readership simply because they're blogging jounalists with their face on the news. Something better than a blogger-lanche is a media-lanche. Probably the best lanche I can remember though comes in the shape of the Canadalanche garnered by Captains Quarters. He had just about every Canadian on earth coming to his site because he was the sole source of what was going on in their politics. Everyone remember that? If I remember right he was netting around a million hits a day for a bit.
29 - American Daughter
This is an excellent article. The honesty or sincerity of the blogging medium, our only resource in the face of the failing mainstream media, is threatened by this practice. Link-doping, and the Truth Laid Bear, degrade the Blogosphere in the same way that ratings-driven programming degrades the broadcast media. We've participated in only two coalitions, both for reasons we deeply believed in--the fight to save Terri Schiavo and the effort to support Oriana Fallaci. Other than specific and compelling causes, we do not aspire to be allied, homespun, part of a carnival or cotillion, etc.
Sam, I think terms like payola should be reserved for two other practices. First, the artificial enhancement of traffic (e.g. BlogClicker) which drives up the adsense payout for useless traffic and dishonestly robs the advertisers. Second, the multiple pinging algorithms used by one or two webhosts to inflate the SiteMeter statistics for their clients. Based on a remote statistical analysis, I am sure that at least one popular webhost is triple-pinging SiteMeter for each visit.
30 - Aaman
Interesting - tell us more about this host and Sitemeter pings
31 - Elvira Black
Great article! I believe that TTLB's recent overhaul may have been designed to curtail link doping, but it resulted in a lot of gnashing of teeth as sites (at least initially) found themselves devolved into much more obscure life forms than before.
I and others have also had some frustrations with Technorati, which seems/seemed to be a victim of its own success in terms of keeping up with the status of a blog in terms of incoming links etc. I'm speaking here especially of the smaller blogs, where every link counts.
But I believe both sites have now instituted a practice wherein only recent links count, though I could be wrong. In any case, great piece.
32 - george
May i insert my link here? XD XD XD XD