What's up (or down) with Zeldman?

[Updated 19-Nov-2004]

Robert Scoble wrote on September 30:

I get to see trends that happen over time. For instance, when I started blogging, tons of people would link to Jeffrey Zeldman. He's a design guru who's written great books on designing with Web standards and such. But lately no one has even mentioned him in the blogs I'm reading. Why?

Well, this got me curious so I looked up the PubSub LinkRank for zeldman.com and found that it was 648 on September 30, down from 629 the day before. Being the 648th most popular link destination isn't bad! But, what was it awhile ago? So, I dug into our databases and created a chart of the Linkrank for zeldman.com over time which I published in this blog. Time has passed, so I've dug into the database again and created a new chart which shows Zeldman.com's LinkRank going back to August: (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Clearly, Zeldman was losing popularity rapidly back when Scoble first made his comments and he continued to lose popularity for some time afterwards. However, there has been a pickup lately -- which presumably indicates that while Zeldman may have gone through a period of publishing less-then-enthralling content, he has somewhat returned to being able to produce what readers find interesting -- or, at least bloggers want to link to (there is a difference there...). But, of course, one can't really be sure what is going on unless you study the day-to-day publishing and linking history -- not just the rough evidence of results as shown by LinkRanks.

In his post, Scoble asks: Why is Zeldman being linked to less than in the past? Well, I'll leave the speculation to Scoble and others, however, I would like to point out that bloggers who are trying to track their "success" would be well advised to keep an eye on their Linkrank as computed by PubSub.com every night. Watching your Linkrank can give you an idea of how well you are maintaining the interest of your particular community of readers. In most cases, but not all, if people find that what you are writing is interesting, they will link to you. If they aren't linking, then they probably won't be reading much longer -- or have already stopped...

bob wyman

Comments

[Hmmm]

Some people have far too much time...

[Matt]

That only counts links in actual posts, right? So it would miss sidebar or blogroll links. Some of Zeldman's most influential work exists not on his own domain, but on Digital Web or A List Apart.

[Bob Wyman]

Matt, Linkranks are, as you suggest, based *only* on links from actual posts (items in RSS or entries in Atom). We do not consider links from blogrolls or other "HTML" links that aren't in posts. If you are interested in numbers that do consider such non-post links, I think the numbers that Technorati generates would include them.

bob wyman

[Greg Gershman]

A link rank would be relative thing, right? It's not an objective gauge of your popularity, just a comparison of your popularity versus others'. As the blogosphere grows and evolves, it is likely that technology blogs will lose some of their former prominence, as more non-techies start blogging. It's possible Zeldman has the same average number of links, or possibly more, than he did in the past.

Response on 3-October-2004:

Greg: LinkRanks are, in fact, relative. Thus, they are measures of popularity -- not absolute numbers. That's why we call them "ranks" not "scores."

We compute a "score" internally and then rank order sites according to score but don't publish the scores themselves. (Although we're considering it.) Because of the ranking function, some information is lost for the sake of making inter-site comparisions easier. For instance, the difference in score between sites that are only a few ranks apart can be very large for those with low LinkRanks but very small for those with high LinkRanks. You can get a hint of this by noticing that the variability in LinkRank is much lower for those sites with low LinkRanks then it is for those with higher LinkRank. For instance, Amazon has always had LinkRank #1 except for on one day when it traded places with nytimes.com which normally has LinkRank #2. On the other hand, if you look at sites with higher LinkRanks you'll see that they move up and down in LinkRank much more often. (Compare the "bottom" of the top 100 to the "top". You'll see many more green and red numbers, indicating movement, among the numbers at the bottom of the list.)

As for Zeldman's numbers, what you're basically suggesting is that while Zeldman may have weak relative strength compared to the entire universe of sites, he might still have good relative strength compared to other sites in his industry or topical segment. Yes, that is possible. However, it is not the case at this time. The drop in LinkRank for zeldman.com, in this specific case, is too great to be explained in this way. This would be easier to show if we were computing "sector-based" LinkRanks -- which we hope to do in the future. However, we've wanted to get a bit more experience with the LinkRanks themselves before making the system more complex. If you have any ideas how we might be able to improve the system, please let me know.

bob wyman