The evolution of blog ranking mechanisms (Trends in the Living Networks ranked #549 by Wikio)

Wikio represents the new breed of media and blog aggregation, bringing together a range of features to improve access to breaking news. It includes the top-ranked breaking news, top blog stories, latest stories and conversations in 16 categories, and a shopping section featuring the most popular products, with user rating of stories. The founder Pierre Chapaz has described Wikio as “Google News meeting Technorati meeting Digg”.

The company is based in Luxembourg and until recently has had a primarily European audience – it is particularly popular in Italy and France. It officially launched in the US in December, with Mashable at the time calling it the Rolls Royce of MemeTrackers.

Wikio has had a swift development path, regularly adding new features. The latest is a ranking of the top blogs, overall and by category. Certainly the site that Wikio is most comparable with is Technorati, the original and once predominant blog search engine. While it is still the reference blog search engine, it has been losing presence primarily to Google Blogsearch, though other blog search engines include Ask Blogsearch, Icerocket, and Blogdigger. As importantly, attention has been shifting somewhat from blogs to Twitter and other conversations.

Perhaps the most important feature of Technorati for its avid blogger users is the blog ranking mechanism. This is based on ‘authority’, a figure which very simply counts the number of blogs that have linked to that blog over the last six months. The Authority widget on the top of the second column of this blog shows this number. Technorati’s Top 100 blogs and blog rankings are calculated from this score.

Wikio’s top blogs ranking mechanism appears rather more sophisticated:

The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.

Blogrolls are not taken into account and Wikio only counts links from the last 120 days. We thus hope to provide a classification more representative of trends in the blogosphere.

Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.

I have often thought that the Technorati mechanism was rather crude and was ripe for improvement. Certainly I believe that my blog is more influential than its Technorati ranking of 15,967, partly because the people who link to it are often prominent. It is fairly easy for groups of bloggers to link to each other and boost their rankings, with few others ever reading the blog – it is close to closed conversation. More importantly, I am not writing primarily for bloggers who are likely to link to me, but rather for business executives who are unlikely to be bloggers.

On the new Wikio ranking, which takes into account the issue of the prominence of linking sites, this blog Trends in the Living Networks is ranked 549. That’s pretty good I think, considering there are literally thousands of professional bloggers who post many times a day, while I struggle to fit in a few posts a week into a rather packed schedule.

I don’t doubt that blog ranking mechanisms will evolve further. For now, we have what appears to be a considerably more valid approach than what Technorati has been using to date, as long as Wikio’s link scan is wide enough. Hopefully Technorati will respond with a more useful ranking mechanism, and perhaps Google will enter the fray.

I should note that I’m working on a startup that will relate tangentially to this space. More news a little later in the year.