Counting Links

Counting links to blogs has been the most popular way to determine who is "A list", "B list", etc.

I’ve said my piece on the damn lists, so I’ll move on.

Link rank is clearly important.

But it’s even more interesting to see the Comscore and Alexa stats which measure raw users and traffic compared the Technorati and Feedster stats which measure link rank.

Boing Boing and Engadget seem to do really well on the link count.

Drudge Report does better on traffic but not so great on links.

They are clearly highly correlated but they are not the same.

Last week there was a big stink over the traffic and audience stats that Comscore put out.  Clearly they were in need of some work.  But I said that they were a good start and I stand by that comment.

But the accuracy and  of the Comscore and Alexa stats seems pretty good to me when compared to the link rank numbers that Technorati and Feedster are putting out.

This is not mean to be a critiiscm of Technorati or Feedster, just an observation that the numbers are not close in many cases.

Take Wonkette.  It’s #20 on the Technorati top 100 with 5,247 links but its #59 on the Feedster 500 with 4,366 links.

OK, so they were close on the links but the rankings were off.

Well, not so fast.  Technorati has Boing Boing #1 while Feedster has Boing Boing #3.  Pretty close on the rankings this time, but Technorati says that Boing Boing has 16,913 links while Feester says Boing Boing has 36,229 links.

It gets even crazier when you guy down lower in the list.  Om Malik’s Broadband blog has 1,980 links in Technorati and 4,568 links in Feedster.

Then there is my blog.  Feedster says its the 150th most linked to blog with 2,132 links.

Technorati says its the 805th most linked to blog with 1,106 links.

I don’t know which of them is right (if either of them are) and I honestly don’t care when it comes to my blog.

But I think the blog world deserves better if link rank is as important as I think it is.