[hyperlinks] fuel for the big machines

In these days of aggregators, RSS feeds, OPML and who knows what else, where does this leave the humble hyperlink?

It seems very much to me that it is still used by the big machines to assess a blog's "value" or "worth", even though it is only tangentially connected with this. Which raises the next question as to how important hyperlinks are.

I think it was Thunderdragon who ran a post on "Are You a UK Blog?" So I took the test some group had set up and discovered that I wasn't a UK Blog. As you can imagine, this came as somewhat of a shock, as 43% of my readership was UK at that point, followed by 29% from the U.S, 8% from Canada and 6% from Australia.

The reason they offered was that not enough UK bloggers were linking to me. Hmmmm. Now as you know, I run Blogfocus and generally speaking, gratuitously link whenever I can so I hardly saw how they could have been right in that.

So I followed back a number of links I'd included in my own posts over a one week period and realized that while I was thanked on my own site, the fellow blogger often didn't carry that back to his/her own site. And that "carrying back" is where one's assessment as a blog comes from by the machines.

Disclaimer - many, like Welshcakes Limoncello, Colin Campbell, Tom Paine, Tiberius Gracchus, JMB, Lady Macleod, Lord Nazh [whom have I missed?] are kind enough to backlink pretty regularly and a sprinkling of other kind souls from time to time, as distinct from regularly visiting, which then includes good folk like CityUnslicker, Two Wolves, Grendel Grendel, Ian Appleby, Shades and so on but many others simply … don't.

I believe in the principle that one needs to say something fairly significant in the first place to warrant being linked but perhaps if we all became just a tadge more "gratuitous" in our usage of the facility …

Whoa, I hear you say - I've added you to my blogroll - what are you moaning about? Yes, it is a wonderful thing to be in someone else's blogroll and no mistake - it's certainly some sort of confirmation that one is appreciated and no mealy-mouthedness about this whatsoever.

However, for the big machines, sadly, this is not enough. They require hundreds of links in order to be slightly more than a blip on the blog radar. While this might seem unjust, I hardly see how they can do it differently, without prying into people's site stats.

I blame Readers like my Google Reader and bloglinks in part for the situation too.

Second disclaimer - what brought all this on was not my own overall stats which I'm delighted with over this silly season nor the refusal of these people to recognize me as UK [I have a significant U.S., Canadian and Australian readership too] but the position in Technorati of one particular lady I'll not name and her situation incensed me.

Quite frankly, Technorati is anomalous in its decision making.

She is languishing with an "authority" level in two figures whilst another male blogger I checked is up in the hundreds. And yet I see her in many places and the latter gentleman only on the "correct sites" which curry favour.

In short, she's not getting just return for her efforts and I'm sure she'd never ask for it. She'd also say and I agree, that the important thing is just to be read, not commented on or linked. Still, if only half those she visited linked back to her, mentioning something in a throwaway aside, perhaps, her "authority" would shoot through the roof.

That's the point I'm trying to make.