Healthbolt has done some nice analysis of the layouts of top 10 blogs at Technorati and comes up with the following Composite Map.
It gives a unique insight at how a small group of top blogs arrange themselves.
See it at full size and with a key to interpret the colors here but before you go and look at it, see if you can predict what each color signifies in the following categories:
- Advertising
- Search
- Email/RSS Subscription
- Header/Site ID/Branding/Logo
- Content
- Internal Links/Navigation
I thought blue was advertising…
It looks like the healthbolt site is gone and wordpress is re-installed. Too bad, I wanted to read the post. (The image is there, but the rest of the site isn’t)
That is really interesting and does seem to fit with the layout of many sites that I encounter. My own site fits on some of those categories but not all of them.
Before looking at the description, I had most of the areas correct except I thought the blue might have been the search.
Thanx for this information very nice color map and cool looking colors, have I had this map a little bit earlier.
Interesting find; but I agree that with what the author said:
Or was he just saving himself from content vs. presentation comments?
Maybe I sound like a broken record at this point, but…
Content is still King!
P.S. Does anybody even remember what a broken record sounds like?
I’m sorry Michael but I don’t quite see your line of reasoning that the map shows that content is still king.
The only thing it shows me is that the top guys all stick their advertising on the right hand side.
I hope you will enlighten somewhat.
Well, this is a bit of an extrapolation, but if you see that the top guys have all the advertisements on the right side (the least efficient side if you’ve done any testing or research), then I suppose you’re recognize that they’re probably not in it for the money because they’re not as “optimized” as they could be.
So, being that they’re not optimized, they’re probably focused on the other thing – content – which got them to the top ten and thus content is king.
A stretch, maybe, but content is still king. :)
Thanks for posting this, Darren! Very informative. I’m gonna go and tweak my blog now, and see if it makes a difference. :)
Pretty interesting. I’m thinking the top blogs on Technorati doesn’t equal top earning blogs…based on positioning ads away from the “golden triangle” on the top left of the page.
Interesting. Essentially they are saying the top 10 blogs are formatted this way and it is easy to make the (mistaken) leap to saying that this is the most effective layout, which is far from clear.
:lol:
I wish this healhbot site has this post up. It only shows the image when i visit the site.
I was thinking along the same lines as you Michael but the content is not the main focus over all on these sites it is just that our eyes are being tricked by the green – (content) being the brighteest color and standing out the most.
What I have been looking at most lately is the fact that the navigation tends to be really good on the big blogs. I had experimented with having my last 100 posts along the left side of my blogs but it did not really change the page views/user or the indexing of the sites and I also notice that there are no last “x” posts on Darrens blog here as well. The interesting thing is that the navigation tends to be along the right side (maybe just a trend or fad right now) but I have heard that this is better optimization for search engine spidering.
Hi
My blog
http://crickex.blogspot.com
has been declared as a spam blog. I have no idea how and i can assure you that it is far from being one. Blogger.com sent me an email reporting this to me, along with a form for me to fill out in case the blog wasnt spam(which obviously i filled up!)
A very confident message informed me that the process of evaluation of my blog wouldnt take more than 24 hours. However i still havent heard from them and its 2 days now!
If anyone has received a similar error before or knows how to tackle it please please do let me know at- [email protected]
Thanks
Aayush
P.S. I do realize that this comment has nothing to do with your post. However i was only hoping for some help.
Great insight to have prior to choosing a blog layout – much appreciated!
I couldn’t tell what the exact colors were. For example, I thought purple was just a mix of the blue and read but it turns out it was its own independent color in the study.
I liked to comment on Healthbolt about inquiring if there was an Eye Tracking Study done. Does anybody know?
Dustin
[…] ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse points us to Healthbolt’s “Color Coded Above the Fold Composite Map of the Top 10 Blogs on Technorati”, a “heat map” of the most popular blogs layout. […]
Hey,
I clicked the link and it did not work. i think it needs to be updated to http://healthbolt.net/images/map.jpg that is what was working for me…