Boosting Your BlogRank
Earlier this week I made a call out for future blog post ideas in the BlogCatalog discussion. Not surprisingly most people responded wanting to know just what the heck goes into calculating their mysterious BlogRank numbers. Up until now, this has been a pretty tight-lipped secret as to prevent members from trying to game the system to boost their rank. However, i feel somewhat obligated to to share some of the factors that make up the infamous BlogRank and who better than the only person who actually knows how it works.
Before i jump into my tips though, I feel a little BlogRank history lesson is in order. After Tony purchased the site in early 2007, we had the daunting task of figuring out how to convert a categorical and alphabetical blog directory in to a directory that is actually usable.
The original platform had several flaws in its approach. First, once people noticed the listings were alphabetical, it became a game of who could put the most special characters in a specific order to come up first for a category. Secondably, their system for tracking what blog listings you viewed and which you clicked was all done through cookies, so while the hits/views stats didn’t have any meaning, it was easy to game by just disabling your cookies and hitting refresh over and over. For this reason, the previous stats had to be scrapped and everyone reset to zero.
I’m not totally sure who’s idea it was originally, but one morning i woke up and had an e-mail from Tony detailing elaborate suggestions as to how we could score blogs in order to decide what order they appear in the directory. With SEO and PageRanks being the latest craze during that time, it seemed only natural to call our system BlogRank. Over time we have slowly tweaked, added, and removed what goes into the ranks to come up with something that helps highlight the active bloggers and tries to bury the dead blogs in the stacks.
So how do you improve your BlogRank?
I can’t tell you the specifics of what makes up your rank, but i will give you some tips to improving your rank. Below are what Oscar has coined as BlogRank Optimization Tips or simply BRO tips.
- Be Active on BlogCatalog. This, more than anything, has the greatest effect on your rank. The more active you are on BC, the more places your avatar shows up and the more people click through to your listing, click through to your blog, and possibly even join your neighborhood.
- Blog Regularly. Because we pull in your recent posts from your RSS feed, we know how often you are posting and we know when you have stopped. Make sure your Autodiscovery tags are set up properly in your blog’s template and that you are posting on a regular basis. If too much time passes without a post, your rank will slip.
- Show Your Support For Other Bloggers. One of the great things about BlogCatlog is the reciprocation that occurs for all of your social actions. Want to raise your rank? Try raising other’s ranks first. Join the neighborhoods of blogs you like, write a blog review on the blog listings of blogs you like, or just send a friendly shout to bloggers who you think are doing a good job. You will find that your good deed will often be reciprocated.
- Don’t Abuse the System. This in reference to the previous tip. It’s not hard for us to notice what users are adding hundreds of friends or join hundreds of blog neighborhoods in a single day. new users use these tactics in an attempt to get other users to reciprocate their actions and it’s not a good idea. We have several checks in place to make sure these abusers are flagged and penalized. If you get flagged as what we call “un-neighborly”, BlogCatalog makes sure to promote your blog and avatar as little as possible throughout the site. If we see continued abuse, don’t be surprised if that user’s avatar turns back into a black silhouette.
- Add a BlogCatalog Widget. Adding a BlogCatalog widget to your blog is probably the easiest way to get a few extra points tacked onto your rank. However, adding 15 widgets isn’t going to give you 15 times more of a bump. The rank bump can sometimes take up to a week to show up and we do know when you take the widget off.
That’s all the tips i have for now, if you have any comments or questions feel free to ask them in the comments or send me a shout. I’d also suggest that you leave a comment with your current BlogRank, try out my tips, and then come back in a week and see how you have done.