Secrets of the A-List Bloggers: Technorati Links

So, last week, I took a look at the size of entries and num­ber of entries among A list blog­gers. How­ever, many have pointed out that the real secret of the A list blog­gers was in the link­ing. I decided to take that as a chal­lenge and attempted to draw some of the vast amount of cut and paste power of the TNL.net engine to get to the bot­tom of this link­ing issue. In this entry, I will take a look at Tech­no­rati link­ing and try to get a bet­ter idea of what we mean when we’re talk­ing about links as the secret of the A list bloggers.

The first thing was to get a solid list of data I could ana­lyze. So I decided to grab the data for May 19th and it looked like this:

Noth­ing par­tic­u­larly reveal­ing here, as the data shows things that we already knew. First of all, the top blogs end up get­ting a lot of links. This is hardly news and it’s clear that the Tech­no­rati 100 fol­low a stan­dard long tail approach. in fact, it’s almost amaz­ing how the data lines up. When you look at the num­ber of sources, you end up with a long tail graph:

How­ever, when you start look­ing at the links, things get a lit­tle funkier. You still get a power law but less so, it seems:

Basi­cally, the tail doesn’t seem to work. Which brings up an inter­est­ing ques­tion: is there a power law in aver­ages across the board? Are the top blogs get­ting more links from the same sources on aver­age or do they get around the same amount of links, just from more sources? To answer that, I decided to graph the amount of links per site. It looked like this:

What I find fas­ci­nat­ing, is that the A list blog­gers, on aver­age do not seem to receive more links from the same sites. They just receive links from more sites. In fact, there seems to be a rel­a­tive con­sis­tency across the board in terms of links per source. If you look back at the chart, you will notice I cal­cu­lated a few extra val­ues about the set. Your aver­age A list blog­ger gets about 1.36 links from each source that links to it. How­ever, what’s more inter­est­ing is that if you con­sider the whole set, the median for those top 100 blog­gers is 1.33 links per source. So from there we can con­clude that the aver­age site links 1.3 time to another blog. In case the A list blog­gers, they just hap­pen to be receiv­ing links from more sites (at least as far as Tech­no­rati sees the world!)

The clear strat­egy here is that if you want to climb into the esteemed A-list, you need to get more sites to link to your blog. If you have the same sites link­ing to your blog on a reg­u­lar basis, you won’t make it there. This means that the blog world, in a way, is no dif­fer­ent from the real world in terms of how pop­u­lar­ity is built: one per­son at a time. How­ever, it could also bring some inter­est­ing new insight for blog­gers who seek to dom­i­nate a niche: it could be argued that niche blog­ging will get you only so far. If the power laws hold true to niches (and it seems they do), then there is only room for a few peo­ple at the top… and if your niche is not one with lots of peo­ple in it, for­get becom­ing famous beyond that lit­tle niche.

But what does that mean in terms of the wider world? Should we really trust the Tech­no­rati num­bers? What is the impact of this infor­ma­tion? How does this com­pare to tra­di­tional media? Well, that (and more), dear reader, is a sub­ject for future entries so stay tuned to the Secrets of the A-List blog­ger series for more.