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Measuring the influence of blogs

November 19, 2005

There’s been recent joking on a law marketing listserv about the dollar value being placed on blogs as measured by a formula relating to AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. But on a serious note, what is happening with measuring the value of blogs is similar to what occurred with web sites.

Google is worth what it is because one of its founders, Larry Page, realized that the best sites needed to be pushed to the top of the search results. If they were not, people would not use their search engine. So Google used algorhythyms taking into account various factors. One of the most important factors were links from other Web sites.

Not just any link but links from Web pages that Google viewed as having greater value. Larry Page came up with the PageRank formula to determine value. All Web pages would have a value from 0 to 10. Get more links from Web sites with content relevant to yours which Web sites had a HighPage rank and you were apt to do pretty well on the search engines. That’s assuming you built your site properly with proper title tags and keywords and key phrases.

As we get more and more blogs, there likewise needs to be some way to measure the importance of blogs. Many people believe blogs should be measured by their influence. So we have blog search engines/aggregators such as Technorati, IceRocket & PubSub needing to rank blogs in some way. No one knows exactly what their algorhythyms are based on, but it appears links from other blogs that have a strong influence are important.

More to come for sure.