Twingly, a Swedish based spam free blog search engine which is much like Technorati but is aimed at European market, just recently released two new products, a Top 100 and BlogRank. The first one is a listing of the 100 biggest blogs. Unlike in Technorati, Twingly lists the 100 biggest blogs in 12 different languages based on their ranking system that mainly focuses on “inlinks and likes among other things”. Their second product is BlogRank, which is a number between 1-10 that shows how big a blog is. BlogRank is similar to Google PageRank but just for blogs.
I checked the top list for Finnish and Swedish blogs, but they were not what I expected. Similarly, Mari Koistinen, an active Finnish blogger, had come to the same conclusion and emailed Twingly asking the reason for this. Twingly’s comment below taken from Mari’s blog post (Most part In Finnish):
“The list is based on the data we have in our index. It’s why we say it’s from “our point of view”. We have, for example, better index for Europe overall than for US blogs which makes the list quite unexpected in some cases.
The ranking is based on, among many other things, inlinks and “likes” (search for something at twingly.com and you’ll see what “Like” is). Visitors isn’t possible for us to use in this list right now and therefore we don’t. If you use that parameter the list would probably be quite different.
Some blogs with many visitors may not get so many links and sorry for them, for they’re not on our list in that case :)”
That explanation I did not understand at all.
Luckily, I found a conversation regarding the ranking logic in Twingly’s blog post (here). I quote:
[comment #17. half way through.]
…
Also, I read your reply such that frequently pinging Twingly affects the rank. Then how ‘fairly’ does the ranking respond to the ‘biggest’-question that you refer to?
Answer by Twingly:
…
If a blog pinging us frequently it’s much easier for us to index every blog post from that blog. If another blog don’t ping us at all, it’s possible that we index it anyway but in that case we have some problem to index it frequently because we don’t get a notification (which a ping actually is) every time it’s updated.
The bloggers who ping us frequently is therefore better indexed by us.
Again, thanks. We think it’s great with feedback and questions. They’re really important, so please keep asking!
This time I understood the answer very clearly, but it still does not mean it makes much sense to me to build a blog ranking on that logic.
We wrote about the company earlier here and here.
iasy
Atbrox
TradeShift
Hi and thanks for a great article! To be honest, it could be much easier to understand what we’re doing. We’re working on it.
But the last quote is just saying “we can’t promise that all your blog posts being indexed by us if you not ping us” which is necessary for someone to be on top 100. Not necessary maybe, but the chances to get there is much higher if we could count every link and post, not only the ones we get. The ranking system is mostly based on inlinks, so it’s like Technorati Top 100 in many ways but with our own touch.
Please let me know if there’s questions. We love feedback and people who ask :)
/Anton, Twingly.com
anton@twingly.com
+46 768 99 88 73
I just realized my answer wasn’t so clear either. But the true value of BlogRank, the PageRank for blogs, is a more valuable metric than for example Technorati Authority (which is a number that nobody understand, this blog has Technorati Authority 65 for example, which not says to much…) and other authority systems.
First of all, a number between 1-10 is easier to understand which makes Googles PageRank more valuable too. Another difference is that BlogRank is based on language so the largest blog in Swedish get BlogRank 10, the largest in Finnish get BlogRank 10 etc. We believe it’s more fun to be the counted as the largest blog in a language than to be counted as no 2351 international.
@Anton, I agree with you that BlogRank could be really useful and it makes it that much more interesting when you can filter it by country. Not disagreeing on the value proposition. Where I see room for improvement is how you go about it at the moment. It needs to be foster equality in how blogs are treated and It should not be able to clime the ranks by gaming the system by pinging your servers. This corrupts the index and makes it irrelevant.
Twingly needs to make sure they crawl the web (be that only European IP addresses or the whole world) effectively and base the mechanism on a effective algorithm. If there is human editing, it should be done by you, not by the blog owners who have vested interest to see their blog get higher rank.
i use the service ://URLFAN which to me is more transparent in regards to “ranking websites”. Their top 100 is pretty well respected in the web 2.0 world:
http://www.urlfan.com/site/top_100/100.html
urlfan ranks sites according to their popularity in the blogosphere and shows all their data. It’s a little more clear than both technorati and twingly when it comes to ranking websites, since thats what they focus on.