There Must be a Better Metric for Blog Influence Measurement

There Must be a Better Metric for Blog Influence Measurement | SEOmoz: Discuss: via @PeterAttia

I'm more likely to be influenced by Mike Grehan and Dan Thies than I am to be influenced by WMW/robots.txt. The real problem with these numbers is that they don't reflect influence . I would measure influence by expressions of agreement. That would have to be compiled through links to articles (not to home pages) and analysis of the text around the links. Not a very feasible methodology, I know. A secondary option would be to count links from blog articles to blog articles (but you'd have create a statistical damping factor to allow for negative linkage). Call it ... get ready ... BlogRank. I would ignore Blogrolls and non-blog article links. On the other hand, what about news article links to blog articles? That could be an indication of influence. But how do you know what constitutes a news article? Ultimately, any measuring stick will be lopsided and inadequate in one o...

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