The Daily Background

I’ve been having a friendly little email exchange over the past couple of days with skippy the bush kangaroo, who is one of those bloggers that everybody reads but they can’t quite explain why. And I mean that in a good way.

One of the topics that skippy will frequently write about is the subject of blogrolls. I thought I’d address the technical side here, for those interested.

In order to better understand the way that the internet works (both search engines and normal web traffic), I decided to do some reading when I first started blogging. I would highly recommend reading the excellent “Google Hacks” which is about a lot more than Google, published by O’Reilly Media (no relation to Bill O’Reilly, thank goodness). You can also check out Wikipedia’s entry on PageRank, which is about 24 bucks cheaper.

Basically, Google ranks each website it comes across on a scale of zero to ten. This scale is called PageRank (Yahoo! and others have similar systems). Websites that are just starting out will typically have a PageRank of zero, while websites that are well-established will have a higher ranking. The higher the better, and the more likely that that website (or blog) will get more traffic from Google, as well as other places.

Just to give you an idea of how steep the PageRank scale is, The Daily Background (my blog) is currently a 5 on Google’s scale. Daily Kos has a score of 8, the same as the Washington Post website. Skippy has a PageRank of 7. Websites with a higher PageRank score will typically be listed higher in search results pages. Ever wondered why Wikipedia pages are often very high in search results? It’s because lots of websites link to Wikipedia. Google then assumes that becuase there are a lot of websites linking to them, they must have some cool stuff. So it’s eager to point you in their direction.

PageRank is determined by a super-secret calculation which includes how many people click on your website from Google’s search results, the number of websites linking to your website, and finally the PageRank of the websites linking to your website. In other words, if you get a link from Daily Kos (Page Rank of 8, remember?), it’ll be worth more than if you get a link from somebloggernobodyhaseverheardof.livejournal.com.

We can check PageRank one of two ways. We can either download the official free Google toolbar (which works with Firefox and Internet Explorer for both PC and Mac), or we can just go to a website like this one, type in our website’s URL, and see what the result is. Screenshot below.

Here’s skippy:



Now, at this point, you might be thinking this looks a little familiar. If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably already been to Technorati, the blogosphere indexing site. Here’s screencap from Technorati’s page on me:

As you can see, Technorati calculates rank based (mainly) on the number of other blogs linking to your blog. For another comparison, here’s Technorati’s page on skippy:



Heh, obviously one of us is a bit more popular than the other one. Cough, cough, skip. One of the ways you can very roughly gauge the number of links Google currently has recorded as pointing to your site is by typing the following in Google:


Obviously, you can type in your own website url instead of mine. Be sure not to type the http://www part, or it’ll give you bad results. Pressing search will reveal a list of websites that Google knows link to your website. It’ll probably be incomplete, but you’ll have a rough idea of how popular Google thinks you are at the moment.

Here’s the thing I haven’t mentioned yet though. Google re-indexes the PageRank of every website in their database only a few times a year. Just because you got linked to from the front page of Daily Kos (PageRank of what, kids? Eight!) on July 1st, it won’t mean crap if Google re-calculates your PageRank on August 22nd. Well, it’ll mean something, but much less because Daily Kos’ homepage has a higher PageRank than their archive pages.

But– if you’re on the Daily Kos blogroll, which stays constant year-round (unless there’s a purge of course), then you’re in like Flynn. Whatever that means.

There’s a catch. Way back in the earlier days of Google, some people thought they could cheat Google’s PageRank calculator. People with high PageRanks tried to make some money by offering to link to people for money. This worked great for a short period of time. People converted their pages with high rankings to long lists of links, in order to try and game the system. Google caught on and modified their calculations in one key way. The more links a particular webpage has on it, the less authority it is able to give when Google re-calculates PageRanks.

So now, if a website has 50 outgoing links on their homepage, it will be able to influence the PageRank ratings of those 50 websites it links to much more than a website with 1,050 links on their homepage is able to. Regardless of the Pagerank of the original website that is linking to the 50 or 1,050 websites is. In other words, shorter, more efficient blogrolls are technically better than longer ones, at least as far as Google is concerned.

There’s also a practical side to this. If a big popular website like Daily Kos (PageRank of what, kids?) has 400 blogs on their blogroll, no matter how much traffic they get, those 400 other blogs probably won’t get huge amounts of referrals. On the other hand, if a big popular website like Daily Kos has only 4 links on their blogroll, those four links are likely to get a lot more people clicking on them. Of course, nobody has a blogroll that is only four links, but it’s just an example.

None of this addresses the human aspect to blogrolls though, or the blogger’s etiquette aspect to blogrolls. The blogosphere is a community where attribution is key. Bloggers will give “hat tips” to each other, and if you read somebody’s blog long enough, it’s considered appropriate to add them to your blogroll. Of course, they’re also a status symbol. For instance, I didn’t care how many other blogs Shakespeare’s Sister (one of the top 1,000 bloggers according to Technorati) had on her blogroll when she added me to it. I was just happy to be linked to.

In the end, while all this technical stuff is worth consideration, it really comes down to whatever you want to do, as a blogger. The blogosphere is a really interwoven community that depends on links: without them, we’d fall apart.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog