I've had a few questions about this lately that I thought it would be better to respond with a post rather than try and answer each question individually. The questions usually go something like this;

Could you explain how the popular ranking works. I am confused as yesterday I had 33 visits against my blog and today I have 26 - this seems to be going backwards!!

How do the Most Visited Blogs work?

The rankings for this work on a rolling 7-day period. For example, if we take Sunday to Saturday and the blog has been visited like such;

Sun - 7 visits
Mon - 10 visits
Tues - 13 visits
Wed - 9 visits
Thur - 10 visits
Fri - 16 visits
Sat - 18 visits

The total amount would show 83 visits for the week. However, when Sunday comes around again we lose the 7 visits credited from last week but pick up only 5 for this Sunday. Therefore our new total would be 81 instead of 83 reducing the blog in the rankings (perhaps!). It may depend on what is happening for all the other blogs as well.

You can visit your own blog but it will only ever be counted once within a 24 hour-period.

How do the Most Faved Blogs work?

This algorithm is a little more secretive because it wouldn't be fair if it could be 'gamed'. So before I pass on any hints permit me to share the rationale behind this.

The reason for the Faved Blog feature was to try and quantify member's blogrolls. If you've ever traversed the gardening blogosphere you will have noticed that most blogs contain a roll of links pointing to other garden blogs that the owner likes. Each blog may share some that are the same and then have a list completely different to others. It can be best illustrated with this Venn Diagram.

Blogger A may share some blogroll real estate with Blogger C and Blogger B. Blogger C may then share some with Blogger B. So although each blogger may have blog links that are only shown on their blog they still have some that are in common with others.

We could assume that each blogger has 3 levels of links: (1.) ones that are only shown on their blog - A, B, C (2.) are similar to other blogs - AB, AC, BC and (3.) some that all three share - ABC.

Therefore, links that are in the ABC portion would be ranked higher than AB, AC and BC links, and these would be higher than the A, B and C links. Then if you take this further you will notice that if a blog of high calibre (Google uses PageRank to determine this) were to *vote* for blogs in ABC these may be worth more than a low calibre blog voting for ABC.

If I haven't confused you yet then you're doing okay!

While Google uses PageRank to work out who's vote has more weight, Blotanical has its own algorithms based on a few different variables to determine who's votes cast more weight for the Faved Blog ranking. Needless to say you may have more people Faving your blog than another but still be ranked lower than them.

Apart from this I can't reveal much more other than to say, if you're wanting to get higher rankings for your blog in the Most Visited and Most Faved lists then it pays to get involved with the community. Meet more bloggers, leave worthy comments on their blogs, link to them, read them and have some fun - it will definitely help your cause.

BTW - don't become obsessed with it otherwise you will begin to look spammy.

Posted by Stuart at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I must confess, I have a fetish for watching online properties being auctioned and sold. It's not that different to people who follow real estate but for some it may seem a little *cooky*.

Well... this morning when I tuned in to Sitepoint's Marketplace to see what was going on I noticed that a gardening site had been listed. I clicked the link and lo and behold it had already been sold. Upon checking the listing stats it became apparent that not only had it sold within an hour of listing (most usually take days) but it had sold for the Buy-It-Now (BIN) price of - $US1200.

For that kind of money you would expect to find a pretty amazing blog or website with tonnes of content and lots of backlinks through Google. Yet all it offered was #5 ranking on MSN for the keyword "Container Gardening" - it hasn't even made the first 100 for the term in Google.

What did it have going for it? Here are the stats;

• More than 2500 unique visitors per month
• Domain is over 12 months old - started Feb 17 2007
• Earning Adsense revenue of between $1-$4
• Currently earned $24.25 for the first 7 days of May
• 28 Pages indexed on Google
• 68% of its traffic comes from Google

So was it a good buy? Now there's a tough question. The rule of thumb in buying websites and blogs is calculating the monthly revenue by 20 and this should give you your buying price. In this case it should have been $2,706 ($24.25/7 = $3.46 x 30 days = $103.80 x 20 = $2076) so it seems like the buyer has bought an extraordinary good deal. However, as April and May are the biggest months for gardening revenues I'd be surprised if this sustained.

I wonder though, how much our blogs would be worth should we measure them against the backdrop of this site? If your blog is the same age - or older; gets as much traffic via Google and earns similar revenues through advertising then extracting similar dollars from a sale may be quite possible.

But, could you really sell your blog?

Posted by Stuart at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Firstly, an apology to those who have noticed flashing ads on Blotanical. I hate these as much as the next person and have desperately tried to steer clear of them. Obviously, here in Australia we don't get the same ads showing so I have never noticed these come up on my screen.

I have attempted to rectify the situation by changing some settings and hopefully you shouldn't be bothered by these again. If in the case they are still being delivered please write to me via the Help Desk and show which page they are being displayed on. I will remedy the situation as soon as is possible.

Thanks for your patience in this.

Posted by Stuart at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)