The other day I made an alteration to this site. I do that on occasion. The change I made in this instance was quite small, part of an attempt to make the blog easier to write, and a little less cluttered for people who like reading the things I link to (I like to imagine there are one or two of you). Until last week, whenever I wrote a ‘link’ post (which account for the vast majority of my output recently) I had to begin the post with a link to whichever site I was linking to. Then in the theme, I remove the titles from link posts so that you don’t see the same piece of text twice.
That’s worked OK, but if you use an RSS reader to view the site, you’ll still see the title twice over – one linked to this site, the other to the site I’m trying to get you to visit. Here’s a screenshot from Google Reader, to show you what I mean:
The way I see it, that’s all the wrong way round. The emphasis should be on the link – this blog is just a journal of interesting stuff I’ve seen elsewhere; my site ought to take second stage to whatever site it is that I’m linking to. So, I started using a Wordpress custom field to store the URL of the page I’m linking to, and altered my RSS feed so that that URL appears as the link for the entry, not the page on this site. Suddenly, the RSS feed looks like this:
Huzzah and Hoorah! Birds sang, Angels flew, and much more besides. I imagine it probably confused one or two people at first that links which previously came here now went elsewhere, but overall I think it’s an improvement.
Unfortunately, there appear to have been one or two unexpected side-effects.
After we’d finished recording House of Comments last night (the new episode will be up later today, hopefully) Mark mentioned something a little strange. Ollie Cromwell at The Red Rag has used Wikio Labs to compile an estimation of this month’s Wikio Top 40 political blog rankings, and as strange as it sounds, it shows this site at number 39. Last month, for context, Sharpe’s Opinion was at 82. Either something exceptional has happened to the amount of people linking to this blog (curiously coinciding with a drop in traffic of over 25% over the past month), or something has gone very wrong with Ollie Cromwell’s rankings. Perhaps with the official rankings too – but since they haven’t come out yet, it’s possible they won’t show the same.
So what the hell has happened to give me such a high ranking all of a sudden? Some further investigation revealed that Wikio appear to be listing over 133 backlinks to this site over the past month (By comparison, Google blogsearch reveals 13 backlinks over February), and from a much larger variety of sources than usual. In fact I seem to have an enormous number of links from sites which, upon further inspection, don’t appear to have linked here at all. But, and herein lay the key to the puzzle, those sites had linked to some of the same sites I had linked to.
Playing Watson to Mark’s Holmes, I concluded that Wikio must compile their rankings, in the Labs at least, based on the <link> tag in entries from the RSS feeds they monitor. Because the link tags on this site contained URLs from other sites, Wikio were counting links to them as links to my corresponding posts. What has ensued has been, as they say in technical circles, utter madness.
The upshot of it all is, at least as far as Ollie Cromwell’s estimations go, that my Wikio rank for February has been massively inflated.
Now, there’s a lot of ‘ifs’ in the above. I guess we’ll only know for certain when the official rankings are published, which should be in a few days. The best case scenario is that either Wikio will have noticed the problem and fixed it, or that their actual ranking system works somewhat differently to the pageranks on their Labs site.
So, what to do about it now? Well, I could just leave it. I have, after all, apparently stumbled across an astonishingly effective system for gaming the Wikio rankings. I could, alternatively, contact someone at Wikio and ask to either be removed from their system or have my unusual RSS feed taken into account. I could put my feed back the way it was (and for the moment I have indeed done this), though I confess I quite like it with my modifications.
I haven’t decided yet. I’ll email Wikio later on and let them know what happened. In the meantime, I suppose I ought to let this stand as a lesson to anyone who puts too much faith in blog ranking systems. Or considers mucking about with their RSS feed.