Spotted a nice post on Twopointouch about Technorati’s attempts to measure authority – using Technorati’s link data to categorise blogs into four categories (A to D) based on authority.
You can check out your “ranking” here. To save anyone the hassle, I came out as C-list!
It’s all a bit of fun really. Ian and Amy Gahran are absolutely right in their analysis of whether or not authority can really be measured by just looking at how many people link to you.
While it’s headline-grabbing to use hard statistics to classify things, the truth is that authority isn’t about the numbers. It’s about the people in the audience you reach.
For example most PR bloggers will never reach a massive audience – but if they are read by a small number of people who are key PR players, then that gives them a fair degree of authority with their target audience.
Away from professional blogs, many people write family blogs to keep in touch with families spread throughout the world. The audience for these is tiny, as Technorati’s authority measure would be. Yet in reality the blog’s authority with the target audience is very high.
The old adage springs to mind – it’s not really about the quantity, it’s the quality that counts.