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More additions to the PA top Technorati ranks table

Published

1 year, 4 months ago

. 0 Comments

The top technorati ranks table for Planet Atheism members has been improved again. In addition to showing the Technorati rank, number of incoming links (from Technorati as well), and Google Pagerank, the table now shows Alexa ranks as well.

You can now also click on any of the above column titles to sort the table by that particular value/rank. Incoming links and Pagerank are “the more, the merrier”, while Technorati rank and Alexa rank are “the lower, the better”, so sorting takes that into account.

A note of warning: I’ve mentioned before that you shouldn’t really take any of these ranks too seriously, and this is especially true for the Alexa ranks. Alexa is a nice idea (it’s the only one that measures traffic instead of incoming links), but it has the following problems:

it only counts hits if the user has installed either the Alexa toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or the SearchStatus Firefox extension (I recommend the latter, since, as everyone knows, MSIE sucks), and
it often lumps all subdomains for a particular domain together (i.e. doesn’t distinguish between aaa.domain.com and bbb.domain.com, even though they may be totally unrelated). It apparently has some hard coded exceptions for some (not all) blogspot.com blogs… but the values aren’t really reliable. Still, you can use it to measure the changes in traffic for one site.

Incidentally, the application I’ve coded (and have been improving) to generate this table from a list of blogs is almost ready for public release.

My Technorati ranks "toy"

Published

Pedro Timóteo

1 year, 4 months ago

in Blogging, Google, PHP, Programming and Unix / Linux / *BSD software

. 1 Comment

Inspired by Carlos Andrade’s own tool, I’ve just coded a couple of scripts to take an OPML file and show an ordered table of Technorati ranks. Naturally, I used it for my own Planet site, Planet Atheism.

Here it is: Technorati Ranks for Planet Atheism members

The implementation was ridiculously simple (and there’s a lot of room for improvement), but, other than Carlos’ tool, I didn’t find any scripts or utilities to do this. And, yes, I searched. Therefore I may release the code soon, as the 2nd project on software.dehumanizer.com, since this can be a fun “toy”.

[EDIT: added each blog's Google PageRank to the table. Why not? ]

Does belonging to a ‘Planet’ site increase or decrease traffic?

Published

Pedro Timóteo

1 year, 8 months ago

in Blogging

. 3 Comments

A question that arose among members and possible members of my new Planet Atheism is this: won’t people start reading my writings through the Planet, and never visit my blog again? In other words, won’t it reduce traffic?

Traffic is important to many kinds of blogs (and sites in general). Maybe you are supported by ads, either as a main source of income, or just as a little extra cash every month. Maybe your blog is more about the comments than the posts themselves. Maybe it has other interactive features, which won’t be seen by anyone reading it through the “Planet”.

So, the question makes sense.

My own experience of being a part of a Planet — in this case, Planeta Asterisco, which aggregates this very blog — has always been positive. It hasn’t made me “famous” , but I notice that I get readers from the aggregator, that other members themselves sometimes comment on my posts, and so on.

But you can consider the following factors:

losing any traffic should be incredibly rare, if it happens at all. Any regular readers you already have will probably keep reading your blog the way they’re used to.
belonging to a Planet will increase your readership; depending on the Planet’s success, it may increase it a lot. An increased readership, even if many of them don’t actually visit your blog frequently, has many advantages; among others, they are likely to link to any posts of yours they find interesting. And comment on them (which, incidentally, means they visit your blog after all). You also begin to slowly build a “name” for yourself.
you can gain a lot in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). The aggregator includes permanent links to your blog, and to each individual post. Since many of the Planet’s members will also link to the Planet itself, it will probably soon be very well positioned in terms of SEO, making links from it valuable. As a result, you get more visitors from search engines.
you get other members of the Planet as regular readers (since most tend to read the Planet themselves). They all have blogs about (mostly) the same subject as yours, which increases the likeliness of they expanding on your posts in their own blogs, linking to yours. Again, more readers (coming from their blogs), and SEO gains (because of the links).
if you’re afraid of being part of an aggregator, then you should be afraid of having an RSS feed at all, shouldn’t you?