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.