Web analytics, web metrics, and how to use them to track and improve conversions

Blog Authority is not the same thing as Blog Influence according to Matthew Hurst at Data Mining. There's no single way to measure Blog Authority, but some, like Matthew Hurst, think you can measure Blog Authority by Topic or Category (ie: Celebrity Blogs are measured by the the Dirt 100 which "uses an algorithm to rank the top 100 Celebrity blogs" according to Ryan Caldwell over at Performancing). 

"...the take home lesson is this: BlogJuice, EatonWeb, SEOMoz Page Strength and a whole slew of ranking tools (probably even GOOG itself) use Technorati data to evaluate the strength and authority of websites. And the temptation is to assume that a massive company like Technorati gets everything right.

Well that's wrong. Today I found out that Technorati wasn't tracking or storing data properly for at least one blog. I wonder how many others are out there with the same problem. You'll only know if you look;-)" 

The implications are that ranking blogs based on derived data from other services into some sort of equation is only as reliable as the data sources itself.  In Are You a Traffic Hound or Blog Authority? Blog Authority is about "about the relationships. You want return customers coming back for more and telling their friends about what you have to offer. You want to build a reputation and become the source for the right information for the right people in the right industry."

I feel the idea of Technorati Blog Authority where blog "....authority is (measured by) the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has" is a flawed way of looking at Blog Authority because it's getting links from other blogs can easily be manipulated on one hand, and is easy to do, so it does not actually measure Blog Authority in my book; Technorati Rank is based on Technorati Authority, so it too, is flawed, perhaps worthless.  I know many still find uses for Technorati, but I think Technorati Blog Authority and Blog Rank are next to worthless.

When Technorati is on the blitz for a blog - it may mess up even it's Google Ranking, if I'm reading Ryan Caldwell's post correctly (I don't know why Google would look at Technorati as a ranking factor when it has it's own blog search engine ..... and I'm of the opinion that Google does not use Technorati Blog Authority or Blog Rank for anything).  

So what if SEO is impacted and you'd have to be on top of all the any data source that's used to measure influence and authority of a blog or website?  I'm just wondering if a rating systems like the Algorithm for the Dirt 100 (a derivative of other rankings such as Google PageRank, Bloglines Subscribers, Technorati Authority Ranking, Alexa Ranking and Dirt Points) really measures anything at all? 

Some, like Copyblogger, think you can become a Blog Authority by studying other authorities and checking your thoughts regularly; but, I don't think striving to be a blog authority makes you one.

So what is Blog Authority? Hurst thinks Blog Influence is not blog Authority.

"...Let's imagine we have three blogs: A, B and C. A has 10, 000 readers, B has 100 readers and C has 10 reader. Let's also characterize the topics that these blogs write about. A writes about topics t₁, t₂, ..., t₁₀, B writes about t₅ and t₆ and C writes about t₅ only.

Now, suppose C writes something interesting on topic t₅ and both A and B links to this post adding their own particular commentary. Who will drive more traffic to C? A or B? While A has many more readers than B, it is topically a very broad blog. The writer doesn't have the time (or expertise) to really go deep into the issues of all these topics. Consequently, her audience is not made up of experts in those areas and reads there to get a high level picture over a broad range of topics. On the other hand, B's readers pretty much just go there for 2 topics. B has time to go in to detail and understand those topics and is probably spending plenty of off line time in that topical space as well. Consequently, B will actually send more traffic (not relatively more, but absolutely more) to C than B will due to the specialization of his audience.

What I'm describing above is the difference between some notion of popularity (which may be called influence) and some other notion of authority (or expertise) and how these issues are related to both the blogger (blog) and the readers of that blog or feed."

Matthew Hurst suggested we measure RSS Feed Readership by TOPIC as a way of measuring blog authority and blog influence and suggests that Feedburner and BuzzLogic each have part of the answer.

So here's what I'd put forward as a ranking algorithm for Blog Authority.

1. Blog Authority should be Topical - with no authority measured for a blog except by topic (or... you can add the sum of all the topics a blog covers by the amount of authority it has in each topic).
2. Total RSS Subscribers of a blog per Topic (determined by having Google dissect FeedBurner RSS Readership for a blog post that has be categorized by Topic) divided by the Total RSS Subscribers for all Feedburner RSS Feeds by that topic.

Example of my suggested Blog Authority Algorithm:

Blog A has 20000 RSS subscribers and writes about Celebrity Buzz.  At the moment Blog A has 400 of it's RSS Subscribers that read a blog posts about Celebrity B.

Blog C has 400 RSS Subscribers and 200 of those subscribers read posts about Celebrity B.

It's been determined that there's an overall RSS Readership this month of 400000 subscribers that read about Celebrity B on all FeedBurner blogs.

Blog Authority of Blog A on Celebrity B = ((400/20000) *400000) where the result will become a numerical score/ranking factor (IE: this case, the score = 8000).

The Blog Authority of Blog C on Celebrity B = ((200/400) *400000) with score = 200000.

By my way of thinking, for the topic of Celebrity B, Blog C, with a much smaller number of RSS Subscribers and less actual readers who read about Celebrity B than those in Blog A, still has much more influence in terms of Celebrity B; therefore, more Blog Authority.

And if you think this is far-fetched, Google has long ago moved towards a Topic Pagerank vs. an overall Pagerank for a website, web page or blog and I saw references to this almost 4 years ago in various SEO Forums - when the Pagerank of some sites would vary depending on the query that was used.

If the Pagerank of a site, or a page, does vary based on the query, then it's likely Google, or any other search engine, decides, at a Pagerank level, what rank each page has based on the topic (but it uses backlinks for this).

The main difference between what Google appears to have done for a while, and what Blog Authority, as Matthew Hurst has layed out and I've redefined (for myself) is that we're using RSS Subscribers, not backlinks, and relying on FeedBurner to somehow breakdown feed readership by topic/post.

And that's where I think we're going - and the better that Google gets at improving FeedBurner to get it to determine readership by a blog's topic, and break down a blog post, by topic (using semantic analysis and tagging) the more accurate and useful will Google's Blog Search Engine and Blog Authority Ranking.

So, I see the key as harnessing FeedBurner to data mine the topic of a blog down to an almost atomic level and the come up with visualizations that enable Blog Authority and even Blog Post Authority to be determined on the fly.

It may then be possible to determine the influence of a Blogger, overall, independent on what they are blogging about or where they blog about it.  It may also be possible to calculate the influence of a blog, overall.