The Great Blogroll Purge of 2007

Terrance of The Republic of T has just posted a recap of the Great Blogroll Purge of 2007, a.k.a Blogroll Amnesty, or BAD.

On January 14, Atrios declared that February 3 would be Blogroll Amnesty Day. In a turn of phrasing that perhaps was a bit too Orwellian for many people's comfort, the "amnesty" involved was to be a blanket pardon from recrimination for anyone who wanted to prune their blogroll.

Now Atrios can declare a day Blogroll Amnesty Day, and so could I, and so could any blogger, but will the amnesty come when he doth call for it? Not this time.

Blogroll Amnesty Day came, and Atrios cleaned out his blogroll. So did the Daily Kos, and so did a number of other prominent liberal/left political bloggers.

And Blogtopia (y!sctp!) erupted into the sort of frenzy of recrimination like unto what LiveJournal does when a polyamorous household breaks up acrimoniously, with one faction taking the kids, another taking the house, and a third taking the domain name; and everyone dropping everyone else from their friends lists and putting pressure on their friends to do the same.

Prominent critics of the so-called A-List bloggers cutting people from their blogrolls include skippy the bush kangaroo and Jon Swift. Both on their own blogs and in the comments of many other bloggers' posts discussion the issue, they bring up these points:

• Top-ranked conservative bloggers link much more generously than top-ranked liberal bloggers do.
• Google PageRank depends critically on both the number and quality of inbound links to a site.
• The simultaneous cutting of many blogs from top-ranked liberal blogrolls therefore reduced the liberal blogosphere's overall PageRank.

I was going to write something about this, but my attention waned even as my notes grew. But late this week Terrance at The Republic of T re-energized the conversation with his thoughtful post. Terrance calls attention, in particular, to "Blogs to Riches — The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom," an article in New York Magazine last year about the stratification of the overall blogosphere, the money made at the top end, and how much harder it has become to reach the blogosphere's higher reaches.

Chris Clarke at Creek Running North says a lot of what I was going to say:

And I wonder whether the whole discussion is predicated on the assumption that there’s one blogging hierarchy, when in fact there are several. Making Light is way up in one, Twisty in another, Dave Winer in another.

I care and I don’t. I couldn’t ever climb anywhere near the top of the political blogging hierarchy even if I wanted to: I’m just too far to the left for such a thing to happen, and I keep mentioning pesky things like the history of US imperialism prior to 2002. Of course, that might keep me from becoming a leading dog blogger as well. That and not having a dog. ...

But I look at my referral stats, and once you subtract out the 95 percent of my traffic that comes straight offa Google, the bulk of people who click over here come from blogs with far less traffic than the big folks. And all those links from less-trammeled blogs mean more Google traffic, too. Technorati, which misses a lot, says about 325 places link in to this domain. About a dozen of those are at big-traffic blogs, I’m thinking. Nineteen of them go to Ron’s joint. The rest of the links come from non-A-list, and probably non-B-list blogs. Whatever those terms are supposed to mean. I have no idea what they mean, myself. I’m just flinging them around.

My own story is similar, if a lot smaller. 11 inbound links, Technorati tells me, that are younger than six months old. I get a mere 120 hits per day (My hit count has been growing as I've stretched out a longer and longer streak of posting every day that I'm hoping to keep up if I can finish this post before midnight.) Most of my traffic comes from search, but I have an estimated twenty to thirty regular readers. A couple of my inbound links come from well-known blogs (Making Light and The Sideshow) but the rest come from sites that are further down the long tail. Blogroll Amnesty Day did not affect me, because, except for second- or third-order effects.

The New York Magazine article describes a reluctance a seeming A-list bloggers about discussing what it takes to achieve their exalted status and how much money they make from it, But those A-listers are Gawker Media's Nick Denton and Weblogs, Inc.'s Jason Calacanis, who reap the rewards of huge traffic on blogs written by hirelings whom they pay peanuts. In the discussions of the Blogroll Purge I've seen, it seems like people can't tell the difference between Atrios and Nick Denton. Of the high-ranked liberal bloggers, only Markos Moulitsas actually breathes that rarefied atmosphere.

Avedon Carol has written about how she has been noticing, entirely apart from the Blogroll Purge, a decline in traffic in recent months, and she wonders what it's about. It seems to me that what it is about is that blog reading by way of news aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader, where your blog gets crawled by the aggregator and read by many readers, is on the upswing. Traffic is still up, but it's not being caught in the referral logs. Blogrolls don't show up there, either. I read pretty much all of the blogs I read regularly by way of Bloglines, myself.

According to my referral logs, blogrolls just aren't important. I get one hit a day each from Making Light, The Sideshow, and skippy, And I imagine that those hits come from those blogs' proprietors using their blog as a homepage. The true currency of linkage is citations within blog posts. Those are what get readers to click through to find out more.

Blogrolls don't generate traffic; they are there apparently, to share Technorati authority and Googlejuice. As such, don't they constitute a form of gaming the system rather then authentic indicators of worth of linkage? Links in blog posts get clicked. Links on sidebars don't. Which link is more valuable?

My own blogroll policy: A blog is guaranteed a spot on the As I Please blogroll if and only if the blog's publisher has sex with me. That's the only way you're guaranteed a link. For group blogs, only one co-blogger needs to sleep with me to get that blog on my blogroll. Acceptance of any offer made, and determination of what constitutes "sex" is at my sole discretion. Don't even bother emailing me to ask for a link exchange.

That's the only way to guarantee a spot on my blogroll, but because I'm a generous guy, I also link to blogs whom I mention in my posts, but that's on an arbitrary and ad hoc basis.