Robert has made this scam the staple of his sorry excuse for a blog. He picks, manually, a bunch of blogs he follows and then ranks them according to dubious criteria. He then publishes them as a monthly Best 25 Political Blogs.
One of those shady criteria is the Alexa ranking, one that requires users to have the Alexa meter installed in their browser bar, which only a tiny fraction of users have. Those add-ons to toolbars are extremely unpopular because of privacy concerns and because such widgets have a tendency to crash the browser. Alexa numbers are therefore highly misleading.
But Robert continues on with his scam, and those listed on his ranking lap it up.
Unfortunately, there is no reliable ranking for blogs – not until some major company like Nielsen, etc. decides to develop a reliable system. The number of comments posted don’t tell the story either. Out of 1,000 visitors to any blog, perhaps two or three actually leave a comment. And when blog posts show long threads of comments, a closer look usually reveals the same three or four posters who post 20 comments each or so – again, not representative at all.
Update: Here’s the real list of the 25 Political Blogs.
Another update: Here’s a ranking based on Technorati (also objective, unlike Jago’s joke list)
One more update: Apparently, some of Jago’s readers can’t believe that Small Dead Animals and similar crap sites don’t show up in the rankings generated by simple Technorati and Google searches. It almost seems that these search engines can recognize quality, which is why the SDA et al. crap has been left off by their algorithms. If you don’t like it, go and complain to the programmers at Technorati and Google.
Filed under: Blogosphere | Tagged: Blog ranking, Internet scams, Robert Jago
[...] give all bloggers a bad rap Posted on August 7, 2009 by Werner Patels I’ve written about this before. Unfortunately, Robert Jago continues to lie to and con his [...]