It's a happy day here at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix: the great Technorati gods have finally updated our links and rank, showing after three months of publishing that this blog has garnered 990 links from 467 sites....


Prior to yesterday, the Technorati link count was like a dog with a pork chop -- it bared its teeth and refused to budge off of its stance of 66 links from 32 sites, no matter how much I begged and pleaded and tried to play the alpha. So, for most of the first three months of this fledgling's life, the Daily Fix appeared to have Failure to Thrive syndrome.
Then, suddenly, Technorati budged, ranking us 3,436 in its relevance algorithm. Cool!
I guess. Because my next thought was–well, so what? Why does Technorati matter, really? And why are links truly important?
The textbook answer is this: Linking is important because it gives a snapshot of the relevance of any given site on the Web. In other words, our number of links give a tangible view of how often the Daily Fix is cited, and subsequently considered an authority.
Links are the currency of the blog world .... they are traded and leveraged, creating a sense of community and conversation, and at the same time offer relevancy and timeliness. In essence, the "link count" offers nothing more than a sense of the breadth, readership, and respect a blog maintains in its online crib.
As for the rank–again, the textbook holds that a Technorati ranking measures the number of sources that point to a particular weblog, relative to other weblogs. So the more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the ranking in Technorati.
The updated Technorati ranking might be momentarily thrilling for someone like me, who puts a lot of my own heart and soul into blogging. But in a sobering, larger sense, Technorati really doesn't matter, because it doesn't measure what is most important.
While Technorati (or any other blog-ranking tool) does a good job of showing how well-regarded a blog might be in the so-called blogoshere, it doesn't at all indicate how important a voice it has outside of that cozy world. The important question is WHO is reading our blogs .... not just how many.
In other words: How often is mainstream media picking up on what we are contributing? Are traditional marketers who aren't bloggers reading? Are we doing a good job educating them about why they should? Truly: how relevant is what we are saying to the bigger conversation?
Believe me, I love this cozy space of the blogoshere. And because I do, I want to see more of us get the attention and readership of the more general population.
Not to get more links and a higher rank, but to truly be heard.