Traffick: Techmeme's New Blog Hotlist: Search Engine Enlightenment

This story is uncharacteristically popping up on a few blogs that don't even publish that often, so I think it must be significant.

Gabe Rivera's Techmeme is going to publish a new Top 100 Blogs leaderboard, and this is being interpreted as a direct shot at Technorati, which has tried to rank blogs by authority (links).

Looking at some of the top sites on the Technorati list does confirm that the ranking methodology is kind of stale. The point that you can easily buy, beg, borrow (maybe not steal) links means that there needs to be a more subtle way of ranking a blog's standing. I'm not sure if Techmeme's method is going to be a huge advance, but it's the man of the hour for now.

I'd read this changing of the guard back into the discussion of how useful link analysis (aka PageRank) is to an overall approach to ranking websites or content in general. Overall I think the PageRank concept has degraded with time, and the final phase of rampant link buying and Googlers scolding people for link buying (and link buyers scolding Google right back) is silly season. The fact that I overhear leading SEO firms saying privately and cynically that "80% of what we do is buy links, for huge sums," pretty much guarantees that SEO won't look like that in a year's time.

To anyone other than a short-term tactician, stuff like this "boost your Technorati rank bootcamp" article is just plumb irritating. Must monetize blog, must get d-listers to link to me, must come up with nouveau version of link farm... arggghhhh.... have fun!!!

But what happens when Gabe's the new sheriff in town and you can't splog your way to easy cash?

I'll keep going out there and building authority for the sites that matter to me, but "thin" link building tactics have seen better days. It's interesting that a site like Techmeme, and its attempt to gain market leadership over Technorati, does such a good job of hammering that point home.

Labels: linking, pagerank, techmeme, technorati