In my hopefully noble attempts at putting together a Top 100 SharePoint blogs list, I discovered that not that many SharePoint bloggers had much background in the various means of determining the popularity of blogs.  So I thought, hey, I should put together a blog on how to determine the popularity and what the various ways and means are in doing so, and how to track and ultimately increase the popularity of your blog.

1. Get Crawled

To get ranked by search engines you first have to submit your site to be crawled.  There are hundreds of search engines, but these days a handful really matter, then it really goes down FAST.  Google is obviously the largest and you don't have to look very closely at your logs to notice that they are your biggest bang for your buck.  Yahoo and MSN/Live are next.  There are various directories for blogs and even search places where you can list your blog.  Don't waste too much time there.  Go for the big big, then if you've got spare time there are a handful of places to list, but for SharePoint this list is primarily going to be in the blogrolls of those at the top of the top 100 list.  Doing each of these three will take 15 seconds, and maybe 2-3 minutes on the yahoo.com site.

Add your URL to Google

Live Search URL Submission

Yahoo! Submit Your Site

(Generic 20+ Search Engines) There are a ton of services out there, but this free service ranks high on Live and Google: Free Website URL Submission - Submit Google, Yahoo, MSN

The crawl will index your pages, which will then at least get you listed even if you're not relevant yet.

2. Get Relevant/Ranked

Relevancy is King.  To get relevant you can do a bunch of things.  Optimize your title, keywords, description, and then for yahoo it's about being in the right categories.  For Google it's primarily about three things.  1) Number of unique domains and IP ranges that link to keywords and terms on their pages to you that they themselves have a high page rank...  2) Page Rank which is it's own formlula 3) Frequency.  If your content gets stale or old then your relevancy will drop.

Let me break this down.

1. Link backs and Trackbacks are common terms used in blogging.  These techniques and terms you'll see in blogging are people that are referring to your content and can either be discussing it.  Blog roles or unique blogs and hence often unique domains that point to your blog will increase your page rank and as well increase your relevancy in search results.  A high number of link backs all from one domain will be less relevant than 40 or hundreds of domains pointing to you.  I caution you from trying to spoof this.  You can get delisted or put on a bad list if you simply try to simulate something like this.  In the short term you can make your relevancy shoot up, but they are looking for this and will flag you as suspect.

2. Page Rank is determined by a number of factors and algorithms.  The page rank is another key factor for getting your site or blog to come up high on Google.  The google algorithm trusts more in recent behavior and less in keywords and terms and frequency on a page.  The behavior is what are people saying is relevant when they are searching, and what are they linking to as relevant terms with keywords on their pages.  This is what is relevant.  Then when people link to content, how unique are they and how relevant are their pages.  How important are their sites themselves in terms of click throughs.  You can most definitely expect that they are mining every search request with destination as well as each index that goes out and indexes new content.  If people find it a good result and people are clicking through and are seemingly pleased, then they are more likely to put it higher in the ranks.  New sites and pages are on probation.  Just because your content is relevant doesn't mean it will get a high page rank in the beginning.  You can see your pagerank by using the webmaster tools.

Here's an explanation from Google on PageRank

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query. "

3. Update Frequency - If you post content or are changing content on your site this will encourage the crawler to come back more often to your site and will also encourage higher ranking.  Not just changing a number or flipping a bit, but actually changing the content and getting new links to new pages will encourage higher ranking.

3. Get Involved - Track and Grow Your Community and hence gain Popularity

Know your readers and get involved. It's great that your blogging or have created your site and have cool content up there.  How sticky is your site?  You long is the average session length on your blog or site?  5 minutes?  13 minutes?  27 minutes?  How many pages does the average session consume?  These are very relevant questions.  You really want your users not just to go for the home page or to offline view your RSS, but you want them to come to your blog, consume your content and spend time digging for content and enjoying themselves.  Blogs are intended to be a wealth of knowledge where people can contribute through comments where others can read their comments and respond having a discussion right there with the content.  In addition it's awesome when you see the blogger themselves getting involved in the discussion.  A follow up post can really drive the relevancy of the discussion and help address the needs of the users. 

One of my favorite ways to get to know my readers is through Technorati.com

Technorati will tell you 3 major things.

1. Who is linking to your posts and what are they adding or saying - you want to read what people are saying about what you wrote.  This will really enforce why you started this whole blogging thing anyway.  The most rewarding experience of blogging is seeing people respond to your posts and add their own message.  It's not just the occasional link where someone says.  Check out this cool post by Joel.  It's the post where they say, he said this, but I think this and let me tell you...  I've had exchanges like this on File Shares where they still continue to inspire others to elaborate on the various parts and pieces.  It's fun when it even crosses technologies where you see Notes guys going off about their features and Windows guys or Exchange guys talking about there's.  The Internet is big and your community that follow your blog doesn't have to just be restricted to those that you think about every day.  I found on my previous blog that the biggest thing I had going for me was my posts on blogs, ironically.  The cross section of the non SharePoint people were coming from Google in droves looking at my blogging posts and enjoying them.  What do you have that's unique that people will get inspired about?  I think it's great when you can post questions and you have enough in your post that it inspires questions and answers.  Just today I was searching for "why do people put shoes over the telephone wires."  My search was shoes and wires, and the top 10 results that were relevant where blog posts and some discussion boards.  The best posts were those that had mini debates in the comments or those that included multiple points of view.  Looking at the results I feel much more informed.  My wife heard it was for good luck.  I thought it was from bullies, the top 10 search results and their debates would suggest it's drug related.

2. Use and Understand your Technorati Reactions and Authority - A single number can't tell you everything, but it's formula is a fun one.  I've found it to be the easiest way to determine popularity in a single number.  Why?  Cause it looks at # of unique blogs that link to your blog, # of links (trackbacks), and gives you a rating.  Sure this rating is based on it's own tracking of more than 10 million blogs these days, but I've found it fascinating to see what the top 100 or top 1000 they have.  You'd think it would be NyTimes or CNN, but no.  It's much more organic than that.  I'll let the others tell you about these very organic services that people LOVE to track, but it's not an empty suit.  There are people and people that trust these people and hold them in very high standards.  Take Scoble.  He's likely our guy we can hold up and say man that guy has it figured out.  He's blogging, twittering, and doing his cool videos and responding to the news like no body's business.  His following is thousands and those thousands have thousands that follow them and hence the authority is being built.  Hence the rank that technorati proves is Authority.  The popularity of blogs truly should be placed on where do people put their trust?  What's the best way to establish that you trust someone?  To put their blog on your blog, not just to link to it, but to actually add it to your blog roll where it will stay until you change it or remove it.  One SharePoint MVP recently suggested that popularity is subjective.  Sure it is, but what's the best way to vote for your top 5 or top 10 blogs?  To put them on your blog... that's how.  If you want to vote for 100 then put 100 on your blog.  No one is telling you how it's done, but that's just what people are doing and it's in turn providing "Authority" and even adding to Google page ranks in a round about way.  (By the way if you aren't seeing authority then you need to register with Technorati.  "Claim your blog."  It's not a bad gig.  They will then crawl and track your trackbacks.  This is especially important for you SharePoint bloggers out there that don't have trackbacks built in.  This will help you to more visibly react to those that are talking about your blog.  Visiting technorati on a weekly basis is something I do even if only to see what reactions there are for my blog.  Essentially that's what I'm looking for and appropriately named.... Reactions.

To determine your Authority and Read "reactions go to http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.sharepointjoel.com and replace www.sharepointjoel.com with your own URL.  If you get a 404, then go ahead and register.  (You can also simply use their search interface to put in your keywords or your entire URL.  It will automatically strip the http:// and the www)  I usually don't encourage people to register for things, but these guys are really trying to track all blogs and it will benefit you in the end.  They don't sell your info, and really I don't care if you give them bogus info, at least you can see your tracking info and get them crawling/tracking your links and trackbacks.  When you get to that page for your blog, you'll see either "claim this blog" or a question of "is this your blog?" then you can claim it and register it and so on.

Some notes from the Technorati FAQ on authority...

"Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog.

The best way to increase your Technorati Authority is to write things that are interesting to other bloggers so they'll link to you. Linking to source material when you blog is also a great way to engage in conversation and help others find what you find interesting."

3. RSS Reader Stats

Feedburner from my experience is the best way to do a few things with your blog...

• Keep it dynamic.  You will mostly change the domain or need to redirect your feed in the lifetime of your blog.  Feedburner keeps your feed separate or dynamic so you can easily change your blog without loosing your readers.  I see it as a must have.  It was sad of MSN not to have seen the utility in this.  Good job Google for scooping this baby up.  It is a must have.  The feedburner people are getting this post without even needing to realize I went from http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo to www.sharepointjoel.com.
• Stats - you can get page stats from multiple sources, but man Feedburner understands readers and clients and can help you keep track of it all over time.  You'll thank me if later for this one.  You don't have to use the widgets when you first start putting this up.  You don't even have to tell your users.  In the background transparently change your feed for this one.  I'm not going to tell you how to do that here.  You could send out some blogs telling your users how to do it, or do some experimenting.  It's amazing to me, I swapped out my old feed for a feedburner feed maybe 1.5 years ago and I still have a few hundred people subscribed to my old blog, and they are missing this post. 
• Gadgets - there are some cool tracker things you can add to your blog. 
• Feed modifications - I really love the ability to add the little icons at the bottom that encourage people to get active with the content. By digging it or whatever.  You can even do some interesting things like fixing up your URLs... there's some *very* interesting things you can do with Amazon for example.

Out of feedburner you want to look at the number of subscribers and understand how they are reading it and how many are clicking through.  This % will give you an idea of how many are really getting into and understanding the context.  The people reading the RSS in the readers vs. the people reading it via the web can ultimately have a different experience.  You can't rely on the stats to tell you everything, but it can help you start to understand your audiences better.

BlogLines and Google Reader Subscriptions Stats

These online readers can give you public subscription numbers that can help you compare your own statistics with your friends or with others that you read.  I recommend you see how your blogs look through the readers and see how easy they are to find.  Can you type your name and find your blog?  Can you type SharePoint and your first name and find your blog?  Other keywords?  I was surprised when compiling this list how difficult it was to find some blogs.  Some of it totally unnecessarily.  If they just had some of the keywords like at least SharePoint and something else that people might be looking for then it would help a ton.  You want it to be easy for people to find you.

I also found a unique set of stats here...  Frequency.  How often do you blog?  How often should you blog?  I already mentioned that frequency was important for relevancy or at least played into it.  I'm not going to tell you, that you have to blog every day.  You don't.  In fact if you blog too much you may have some subscribers that drop you as too frequent a poster.  Sometimes I think people fell guilty when looking at my posts.  For me it is simply a brain dump and getting thoughts out of my head.  I'm glad that people find it useful.  It's these methods that I get this feedback, in addition to the comments from people at conferences.  If a post is getting 0.0 posts per week, why would I want to subscribe, even if it is the Albert Einstein of SharePoint?  Maybe he'll wake up one day and post something fabulous.  True, but maybe someone I already subscribe to will tell me about it if he does.  I guess it doesn't hurt if I know who the Einstein is, but if I don't then having a good smattering of people I trust will tell me if he does.

Google reader - when you're looking for your subscription #s, do a search against blogs, not posts.  To do this, you click "Discover" then in the inside frame in "Search and Browse" you can search for feeds by keywords.    That will make a difference.  You'll notice a huge relevancy focus vs. the subscriber numbers.  They aren't necessarily ordered by subscription count, but you can usually find the blog you're looking for on the first page or you should search with better terms.  I love seeing the frequency thing here.  Note for example 4.7 posts per week on my blog or the  0.7 posts per week posts per week with the Designer team blog or the 105.2 posts per week with the aggregated sharepoint blogs.  Big difference, huh?

Bloglines.com a similar query is important - choose "search for feeds" in the drop down.  Search for "SharePoint" and you'll see there are 1,780 feeds.  The Team blog coming back with the SharePoint Bloggers (aggregated) feed as second then going into the top 100 SharePoint blogs and so on.  The feeds are returned by popularity, again those with the highest number of subscriptions.  Hence if you want more subscribers through this means you have to have subscribers... what a catch 22.  The answer is people likely won't find you though this means in the beginning unless they are searching for YOU and yes, that's likely where you'll get them.

Feel free to blog about this and share your experiences...  Doesn't hurt my feelings.  I just may read your blog.  In fact you can almost count on it.  Web 2.0 is about interactivity and this demonstrates it. :)  I had a foreign exchange student friend from Holland I took out on a date 18 years ago... who read the story I wrote about our crazy date.  All included was her first name and the school I took her from.  She found my email and sent me a note about it.  Amazingly small world.  I'm sure you have experiences similar to this, or are you ready to have them?