As many fellow VOXers know, there is no way to tell how many hits your blog gets (or how many people read or talk about it)… Six Apart doesn’t provide a counting utility to bloggers. (If they did, the bloggers generating the most traffic on VOX might be tempted to leave to start revenue generating blogs of their own.)  I often wonder how many people actually read my blog, besides those that add me to their VOX “neighborhood” or leave comments.  As far as I’m aware, no one has developed a way to accurately automate the combined measurement of blog traffic, quality of content, links from other blogs, etc.  Technorati does a good job of identifying who is talking about which bloggers, so for now, it is what I use to gage how I’m doing in the blogging universe.  But, Technorati only tells part of the story.

This morning, I took a look at the rating of my blog on Technorati.  When I first checked the rating score several months ago, my blog was ranked somewhere around 900,000th. The next time I checked it (weeks later), it jumped to around 300,000th.  This morning when I looked (gasp) it jumped to the 125,511th top blog.  That’s over 700% improvement!  Unfortunately, that’s not at all impressive when you explore what it means.  Technorati’s rating score indicates that socialmedia.vox.com was linked to by 52 other bloggers 30 times.  The more bloggers that link to this blog, the higher my rating score goes.

When I dug a little deeper into who was talking about my blog, I realized that the links to my blog included:

• Legit mentions from other blogs (though there was a duplicate mention, which counted twice – both the original post and then the archived, permanent post).
• People who added me to their VOX neighborhood (My hyperlinked image appears on their vox home page.)
• Multiple links from fraudulent blog sites… By this, I mean links from websites formatted to look like blogs but lacking in their own content.  Take, for example, “MySpaceRIP.com”.  (I won’t hyperlink the URL because the undesired result would be an improvement in Myspacerip.com’s Technorati rating.) This appears to be a holding page for a domain name for sale + advertising space for sale.

All of the bogus “link to’s” that I saw listed under my blog made me question Technorati’s usefulness as a “rating” tool. Based on my experience, no real meaning can be derived from the actual ranking.  However, Technorati is an incredibly useful tool for discovering who is talking about blogs and topics.  One of the most interesting things that I discovered when trolling through my “link to’s” was one blogger’s opinion of the “Top Bloggers On Communities”.  If you are interested in on-line communities, this list is a great resource for new reading material.

If any of you out there know of a better tool than Technorati for measuring the impact and popularity of blogs, please post a comment or, if you’re a non-voxer (and can’t leave a comment), email me, and I’ll post your comment manually.