PageRank. Technorati. Alexa. These words simultaneously strike fear and excitement in the hearts of many bloggers, particularly those who want to grow their audience and make money blogging. While I still don’t fully feel like a pro blogger, I do realize the importance of such rankings, simply because they can have a direct effect on how much someone can charge for advertising on a blog.
Yes, I know that bloggers, myself included, probably pay too much attention to such rankings and ratings. We should be focusing more of our attention on producing quality content and building relationships with other people in the blogosphere, but when ad networks like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe base your rates directly on these numbers, they’re kind of hard to ignore.
Checking up on stats can be highly addictive, but I’ve convinced myself to not check the rankings as often as I used to. These days, I hit up Technorati or Alexa maybe once a week to see what’s going on with Beyond the Rhetoric. Even so, I’ve noticed a definite trend in the last month or so. Or two opposite trends, rather.
That’s my Technorati rank and authority as of today. While I’m glad that I still rock that cool “top 10k” button, I am upset that the number is going in the wrong direction. Just a short while back, I was in the 7,000s and I’ve seen my ranking falter continuously for the past month or two. I have a feeling that this is a direct result of one phenomenon: link trains. Those links are probably starting to expire. In a sense, I’m getting bitch-slapped by Technorati, but in another sense, I should have seen it coming.
On a brighter note, I’ve seen some good stuff going on with my Alexa ranking. As you can see, the ranking has improved by over 30,000 places in the last three months. I broke 100k near the beginning of September and seeing how my rank in the last week is in the 84k range, I am definitely doing something right.
My RSS subscriber count has also been steadily increasing and I hope to break 200 subscribers by the end of the year. Hopefully the new email subscription option will push that along in the right direction.
Yep. My stats on Technorati just did the wobble. I did a bunch of links, but my Technorati score DROPPED from 85K to over 108K, with quite a few new links added…!?
Kenneth
Yup, I think we all dropped a bit on Technorati.
i got it up by 1,000, but anyway i still fall under the 30,000 category, so nothing to talk about..
I think Technorati only counts links you get within the past 3 months (or was it 6), either way this means you have to continually get a decent number of links to stay ahead of the curve!
I had actually just looked at my Technorati rating this morning and noticed that my authority score had gone up since I last looked but my actual ranking had decreased by a few thousand.
Technorati is terrible… so easy to manipulate your numbers. All you need to do is join/post those stupid train links. I never posted them, so my Technorati suffers from it. (authority is slightly better than their overall rankings). Alexa is useless too, but more fun to watch.