Tech Crunch today points to a new service for bloggers called Blogstorm which tracks the number of other websites linking to a blog on a post by post basis.
They are already tracking a number of blogs – including ProBlogger (see our stats here) and provide some useful information. The numbers of links are from Yahoo! and as a result it’s not really a real time statistics (as it takes a while for Yahoo to index sites and find the incoming links to your blog) but if you’re more interested in some bigger picture metrics it could be a useful tool.
The downside of the tool is that from what I can tell it tracks all links – including those from splogs and links where content/headlines are re-syndicated etc.
This means that sites from Weblogs Inc (like Engadget) have artificially high counts on their posts because their headlines appear in the footer of all of their other blogs at WIN.
As a result I’m not too interested in using it as a service to work out what’s hot or not in comparing between blogs – however it could be useful as a blogger wanting to track incoming links on your own blog on a post by post level.
For example the graph below (in the extended entry section) shows ProBlogger’s spikes in terms of incoming links over the last month – and shows just how successful the Group Writing Project was at generating incoming links.
Technorati does something like this but not all on one graph like that.
Obviously a higher traffic blog will have a nicer chart to look at.
Keep up the good work, I enjoy reading your posts!
Michael
compare their citations data technorati – there’s some difference.
technorati.com/chartimg/problogger.net?days=30&height=200&width=400
I don’t think I even have enough posts for it to track… almost 100.
Awesome Darren. Unbelievable the number of links you get, especially on the group writing project. Over 1000 if I read it correctly!
Using the Google webmaster console, you can see which pages/posts are deemed the most important by Google and also see which pages/posts have the most links.
The number of posts doesn’t matter, it depends on how ‘popular’ your posts are! no matter if its a new blog or has only 30 posts :)
I started signing up for that service and stopped when I got to the bit about installing a PHP script on my server. According to the blogstorm people “The reason behind our requirement for a php script is that Yahoo (the place we get our link data) only allows 5,000 queries per day from our website” so they want to use my web server to perform queries on their behalf.
I’m not sure whether this 5000 query limit is due to Yahoo terms of service (in which case it would be unethical for me to help them circumvent it) or due to them not wanting to pay for better access. In either case I won’t be using their service.
This is great.But can we find the stats for blogspot blogs also?Im really amazed after seeing the stats of this blog.Awesome.
This is a prety cool service im excited to see how it competes with technorati’s service. Yeh Darren you got a lot of links to your site lol.
Hi Darren,
I use the Google Webmaster Tools to track the links to my blogs and website. I submit a new sitemap every week and when Google updates their numbers they tell you how many links you have both internally and externally.
I think it’s a much better indication because it comes right from Google and what I care about is what Google recognizes as credible links.
It is way more valuable than the link:www.mydomain.com. For example: link:www.evancarmichael.com generates 368 results but in my Google Webmaster Tools, Google recognizes 118,343 internal links and 3,835 external links. They also break down the external links by individual page or post which is extremely useful in knowing which topics are popular.
I’m just starting out with blogging and this gives me an idea of how much I still have to learn!
Beth
Hi Everyone,
The key aspect of our service is that we monitor your RSS feed each day and measure the links to your blog posts, rather than just tracking every page on your site like Google Webmaster Central.
Hopefully bloggers will see our tool as an additional way of monitoring their progress and use it as well as Webmaster Central.
We offer your link data as a toolbar button and an RSS feed so it is nice and quick to check your stats.
Next week we will be releasing a plugin to display the data in your WordPress dashboard.
Patrick
Support email: [email protected]
Wow! This one is an interesting application. I am sure it would be useful; but it is also an amazingly addictive one.
Cheers!