Blog Rankings

Here's a quick overview of how we calculate our blog rankings:

• The rankings are driven by linking between blogs. In general, the more links a blog receives from other blogs, the higher its score.
• We also consider how many different sources are linking to a blog. 1 link each from 10 different sites is worth more than 10 links from 1 site.
• We don’t count blogrolls, and instead only consider links that appear within recent posts. This keeps our rankings timely, but it also means that if you’re planning a vacation, you may want to consider recruiting all-star substitutes to help keep those links flowing.
• The strength of the source factors into the value of a link. In other words, a link from the top-ranked blog is much more valuable than a link from this obsolete blog in our rankings–just like in real life. For the curious, this calculation involves iterating through the linking patterns multiple times in a technique similar to the original Google PageRank proposal–but on a much, much smaller scale.
• We consider links created in the past 90 days, but depreciate their value over time: recent links are given more value than older links.

Note that our rankings don't incorporate any voting or commenting on our site - they're purely based on our analysis of other tracked blogs.

Finally-–if you have a blog that’s several spots down from our pole position, don’t let it get you down. Blog rankings don’t affect the way that items appear on our Top Stories page, so if you have a great story, don’t be afraid to vote it up! Also, our rankings don’t incorporate strength of reader communities, comments, traffic, or even the quality of your content. There are plenty of undiscovered diamonds in the rough out there, and we’re looking forward to seeing a new batch of blogs on the leaderboard in the coming months as more new voices break through.