On the LinkCounts pages at PubSub, we've made an important improvement in the way we do link counting and thus LinkRank computation. Our intent is to more fairly reflect the actual "importance" of various blogs by eliminating some of the impact of MSN Spaces' unusual RSS publishing practices. For some time now, MSN Spaces has been contributing a disproportionately high number of the links we track since, unlike other sites, Spaces publishes BlogRoll lists, lists of favorite sites, etc. in their RSS feeds. On most blogs, the BlogRolls, lists, etc. are published only on the HTML site, but not in the RSS feeds. By filtering these lists from our link counts (and thus LinkRanks) calculations, we're moving to put all bloggers on more equal footing.
The immediate visible impact of this change is that the number of links we count in our daily statistics has dropped dramatically. You can see the impact by looking at our daily chart of OutLinks. Please note that while we're not letting the lists impact our various link statistics, we are still publishing the "RSS items" which are flagged by MSN Spaces to be lists. Thus, if you create a subscription that looks for links to your site or some other site, you will still be able to find those items/entries via PubSub. The only difference is that links in items flagged by MSN Spaces as "lists" will no longer count towards LinkCounts or LinkRanks. While you can expect that the number of links we claim to process each day will take a big dip in the future, we are still processing just as many individual items each day as we normally would. (See our chart of entries processed each day.) We believe that filtering out these lists will generate a statistical view of the Blogosphere which more accurately shows the information that people are interested in. We hope you agree.
