On Blogging Australia

Facibus on Blogging is listed on two Top 100 Australian blog lists now:

• the Top 100 Australian Blogs list and
  
• Ratified.org’s Australia’s Top 100 Blogs list (listed as Andrew Boyd on Blogging and Blog Life)
  

The two lists use slightly different ways of ranking blogs.

Meg Tsiamis maintains the Top 100 Australian Blogs list and calculates rankings this way:

AU = Alexa Rank in Australia
X = Global Alexa Rank
T = Technorati Rank

(3 x AU + X + T) /5.

Janet Toral sent me a link to an article on how the Ratified.org Top 100 list works. Here’s their formula:

Ranking based on points system
Ratified base its rankings on a point system. The more points, the higher the rank.

Here is the complete formula:

(T*.55)+(PR*100)+(FB*3.75)

T= # of Technorati blog links
PR = Google PageRank
FB= # of Feedburner subscribers

From Technorati, we gather the number of blog links per blog and multiply it by .55. As Technorati can be manipulated, by multiplying it by .55, it is given less importance but still has a fair amount of weight.

Google Pagerank is also factored in. Pagerank can range from 0 to 10. In the formula, it is multiplied by 100, giving it quite a bearing. The higher the Pagerank, the higher chances for a blog to rank higher overall.

Feedburner subscribers per blog are counted. The number of feed subscribers is essential in gauging the success of a blog. We multiply it by 3.75 in the formula. Blog owners must at least activate their feeds’ Awareness API in Feedburner for us to effectively pick up their subscriber numbers. In hindsight, we saw that those who enable their Awareness API get much higher ranks than those who don’t. For Blogger.com and Blogspot.com users, here’s a guide in transitioning your RSS feeds to Feedburner seamlessly.

The two systems look at slightly different figures and will therefore have different results. Lifehack and ProBlogger are both top 2 - but in a different order on the two indexes. Yaro’s Entrepreneur’s Journey is number 3 on Meg’s index and number 5 on Janet’s.

Like other ways of measuring blog success, the ranking systems mean different things to different people. That is, they need to be considered in context. If you are interested in making money online, or spreading a particular message, the rankings help your to measure your success - basically, if you are interested in quantitative measurement, then they are a really good thing.

Note: I’ve entered this article into the Carnival of Australia.