PubSub responds to LinkRanks turmoil

I revealed on Dec 22 that PubSub potentially had made some changes in their LinkRanks application that had a serious negative effect on many sites’ ranking. My blog dropped 32,544 spots in one day, down from 7,495. Well, I didn’t get any answer directly from PubSub, but their CEO made a comment in Trevor Cook’s follow up post.

Hey Guys,

The reason for the sudden shift is that we increased the granularity of how we measure linkranks. Specifically, we added individual blogs from the various hosting services for the first time (e.g. livejournal.com/johndoe) – that has suddenly shifted everyone’s ranking. Bob Wyman, our CTO, dropped 30,000 places (much to his chagrin). Check out his blog for more details – http://bobwyman.pubsub.com

Cheers,

Salim Ismail, CEO



PubSub’s CTO Bob Wyman also posted a comment on his own blog.

The effect of this improvement in the granularity of the LinkRank calculation will take about 10 days to be fully felt. We need to wait for the impact of old links to fade out of the system and for the impact of more recent links to dominate. Once this settles out, it will be fascinating to try to figure out why some sites went up in LinkRank and others went down. In any case, we’ll have more accurate and thus more useful numbers to work with in the future.

Please keep sending suggestions on how to improve LinkRanks — and please forgive what will be inevitable “turmoil” in the numbers as we continue to increase the accuracy and granularity of reporting in the future.



So it seems that the new ranking is more accurate than the previous one, but taken into consideration the drastic changes in rankings, the application maybe was launched too soon. On Nov 18 Ismail said in a press release that “We now feel the system is ready for use by consumers and professionals across the country, and the world”. But as a professional you would want the data from PubSub to be reliable and if changes are made you would expect some kind of information. That information should be clearly visible on the web site, not only on a blog that most people are not aware of. PubSub have yet not published any information on their site about the changes to LinkRanks.

What’s up with PubSub?

Something seems to have changed with PubSub’s LinkRanks the last 24 hours. My ranking has dropped considerably, and so have several other blogs that yesterday were in the top 10,000, while many others have seen no change at all. I know that the rankings can change substantially overnight, but this seems to be more than a coincidence. For example:

* Adland 36,290 (-35,103)

* CorporateBloggingBlog 42,407 (-22,787)

* Crossroads Dispatches 36,938 (-32,603)

* Earnie the Attorney 37,366 (-33,985)

* Kunal.org 36,553 (-34,735)

* Media Culpa 40,039 (-32,544)

* Micro Persuasion 35,795 (-35,558)

* Mymarkup.net 38,346 (-34,058)

* NevOn 36,733 (-34,674)

Could it be that PubSub are adjusting their system in a way that affects some blogs a lot, while others are not affected at all? Steve, it’s your client. Am I too suspicious or has something changed?

Housewives top TiVo list

What tv viewers really really want to see. TiVo Top 25 for the last week (ending 19/12/04). Top ten looks like this:

1. Desperate Housewives

2. The Apprentice

3. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

4. Lost

5. ER

6. The West Wing

7. CSI: Miami

8. Survivor: Vanuatu, Islands of Fire

9. Joey

10. CSI: NY

Desperate Housewives will debute on Swedish channel Kanal 5 this spring. Via Lost Remote.

[Press] Room for improvement

Neville Hobson has found an interesting report from Nielsen Norman Group about how to design a website in order to serve journalists best. Executive summary here.

One journalist described what he’d do when he could not find a press contact, or any of the facts he needed for his story:



“Better not to write it than to get it wrong. I might avoid the subject altogether.”

The top-five reasons journalists gave for visiting a company’s website:

* Find a PR contact (name and telephone number)

* Check basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive’s name, his/her age, headquarters location, etc.)

* Discover the company’s own spin on events

* Check financial information

* Download images to use as illustrations in stories