Bloggers, Start Your Engines
Careful observers of our Blog Rankings at Ballhype may have noticed a mild shakeup this evening. We upgraded our methodology in a couple of ways to try to do a better job of representing current influence among sports bloggers. Before we get to those details, here’s a brief overview of how our rankings are computed:
- The rankings are driven by linking between blogs. In general, the more links a blog receives from other blogs, the higher its score.
- We also consider how many different sources are linking to a blog. 1 link each from 10 different sites is worth more than 10 links from 1 site.
- We don’t count blogrolls, and instead only consider links that appear within recent posts (more on the timing in a minute). This keeps our rankings timely, but it also means that if you’re planning a vacation, you may want to consider recruiting all-star substitutes to help keep those links flowing.
Here’s what’s new:
- The strength of the source now factors into the value of a link. In other words, a link from Deadspin is much more valuable than a link from this obsolete blog in our rankings–just like in real life. For the curious, this calculation involves iterating through the linking patterns multiple times in a technique similar to the original Google PageRank proposal–but on a much, much smaller scale.
- Improved time handling. We now consider links created in the past 90 days, but depreciate their value over time: recent links are given more value than older links. As a result of this change, the rankings are even timelier, and there won’t be as many sudden drop-offs coinciding with links expiring.
Why rank blogs at all? Something that’s true about many sports bloggers is the fact that although they’re often quite willing to help their fellow bloggers, they’re also very competitive. This provides one more way for them to keep score. It’s also a way for sports fans in general to find new blogs to read.
One last note–if you have a blog that’s several spots down from our pole position, don’t let it get you down. Blog rankings don’t affect the way that items appear on our Top Stories page, so if you have a great story, don’t be afraid to hype it up! Also, our rankings don’t incorporate strength of reader communities, comments, traffic, or even the quality of your content. There are plenty of undiscovered diamonds in the rough out there, and we’re looking forward to seeing a new batch of blogs on the leaderboard in the coming months as more new voices break through.
Some solid changes - and I like even though this is clearly a push to get to the bigger original stories overall, you guys are still trying to make sure the little guys get their say as well.
What this also does is promote people to send mass emails to every blog in the universe in order to get their sites linked. I don’t mind people doing that, but it’s something that I do sparingly, thus hurting my ranking and others who don’t spam for links. Just something to consider.
Scrap - definitely unintentional result, sorry about that. We’re not counting blogroll links so if that’s what people are requesting, you’re not missing out on anything by being the modest sort. And to keep things in perspective, more important companies than Ballhype have been counting your links for years (Google, MSFT, Yahoo!).
[…] may recall from our previous post on Ballhype blog rankings that our algorithms now more accurately account for influence and recency when considering a […]
Good point, Erin. Just making conversation, trying to help if I can. And I was referring to getting stories linked, not blogrolling, just to be clear. Thanks for the response!
“Something that’s true about many sports bloggers is the fact that although they’re often quite willing to help their fellow bloggers, they’re also very competitive. This provides one more way for them to keep score.”
The scoring system contradicts this concept. If it’s so competitive, how can the ranking be based on how much credit one blog gives to another. Obviously a blog run by AOL has more accessibility than a blog run by an average basketball fan. That doesn’t at all measure the quality of the blog or the content incorporated within a site.
Also, if there are 400 baseball blogs and 100 basketball blogs, then it’s obvious baseball blogs will be ranked higher as there are more options for bloggers to link to within their “baseball” community.
Perhaps a few more statistics need to be integrated to make the rankings a bit more accurate.
LA Ball Talk - I’d say that links provide a better way to measure influence than traffic. If FanHouse wasn’t highly respected, it wouldn’t be linked by other sports bloggers as often as it is. The current #3 is an independent blog, as are half of the top 10. Many other corporate blogs rank further down.
Sports with more dedicated blogs have more opportunities for links … but also more competition for links.