9 Blog Rankings and How to Manipulate-Part One

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We know in the Blogosphere there’s many ways to rank a website and we see their authority according to this ranking system, but if you look at the many types of ranking tools out there most of them can be manipulated in some way, so which one’s can be trusted?

We all understand that a site with a high PageRank will represent a site with higher authority than a site with lower PageRank, but little do most people know that most of our ranking systems including PageRank can be manipulated. Whether you buy, share or scratch each other back we can improve our ranking with little effort.

This two part article will discuss success ranking systems within the blogosphere, and then give ideas about how you or others can manipulate them for their benefit.

9 - Blog Catalog Rank

Blog catalog is one of the largest online communities currently, it’s where we can promote our blogs as you please. The directory side of the site works by providing category based listings of blogs for a minimum fee you can list your blog and the ranking in the list will depend on your BlogCatalog rank which is determined by a special formula that analyzes your hits, views, comments, neighborhood members and other special secret ingredients to create a numeric score based on a 100 point scale.

Your Blog Rank is used to determine the order blogs appear in the Directory and Search Results. So the higher your score the better your placement in those searches etc.

Can we manipulate it?

Simply by adding as many friends as we possibly can as the weighting for members in neighborhood is important so add friends and then join their neighborhood and you find that most will return the favor, many bloggers have huge numbers of people in their neighborhood and they have never even chatted before.

Update from Daniel from blogcatalog

“Just wanted to point out that if you add too many friends or neighborhoods on BlogCatalog, your rank could suffer. we do have automatic checks in place to penalize this type of gaming/abusive activity.”

8 - Web Site Traffic / Page Hits / Unique Visitors

No success blog can’t have these and traffic is always a part of your success. Generally a blog with large volume of visitors will be successful compared to a blog with no visitors, of course that’s assuming quality traffic only.

Can we manipulate it?

Having a steady flow of traffic over a long period of time is not easy to manipulate although going to social sites can give a short time boost to traffic with the likes of stumbleupon, digg, Sphinn and many others.

Long term traffic will depend on the quality of your posts, presentation of your blog etc, and can’t be done over night.

7 - Alexa

“Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.”

So the likes of MSN, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo etc are ranked as the top so there’s some truth to the rankings but can they be manipulated?

Can we manipulate it?

By using the toolbar for Alexa will assist you to gain a higher rank so maybe more tech savory niches will have slight advantage. The other way is to use a plugin that rewrites your internal links and adds http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? automatically to all internal links. When your visitors click such a link their visit is counted by Alexa and your Alexa rank goes up.

For the plugin check out: hongkiat and freakitude

6 - Technorati Favorites

Although It not a very good measure of your authority but having many people added you under favorites will give others the impression that you write something good, a little traffic will be generated because your RSS feed will be shown to people who favored you.

Can we manipulate it?

Quite simple, you can spend a night adding people to your favorite list and most will return favor with you, it’s a very common “you scratch me my back I scratch yours” thing.

Therefore this type of authority does not hold much weight, I experimented with this last night and got over 20 friends by this morning for just 30minutes work, I joined a Technorati group on BlogCatalog and added all the people in the list

This concludes part 1 for today, stay turned for tomorrow’s top 5

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November 29, 2007 | Filed Under PageRank, Social Media, Technorati, blogging Tips

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9 Blog Rankings and How to Manipulate-Part Two

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Comments

7 Responses to “9 Blog Rankings and How to Manipulate-Part One”

Dolphin on November 29th, 2007 7:18 pm

Thanks for this informative post

Dolphin
Straight Forward on November 30th, 2007 3:43 am

Hi Simon,

I’ve just pubished short review about your blog and I would like to know if you have any remarks to it.

Thanks,
Straight
admin on November 30th, 2007 2:49 pm

dolphin

thanks for joining my site, i followed you all this year and nice see u still around..
admin on November 30th, 2007 2:51 pm

straightforward

thanks for the review
Alexa redirection is worthless? on December 1st, 2007 1:45 pm

A low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on http://www.google.co.in, http://www.search.yahoo.com and http://www.search.msn.com search engines.
Daniel on December 4th, 2007 1:08 am

Just wanted to point out that if you add too many friends or neighborhoods on BlogCatalog, your rank could suffer. we do have automatic checks in place to penalize this type of gaming/abusive activity.

Daniel / BlogCatalog.com
admin on December 4th, 2007 1:15 am

Daniel , thanks for update i have updated my blog acordingly