A New Rating – Outbound Links

I was wondering how some of the features I’ve got running here at Wizbang impact the ratings systems. All of the current measures are blog centric, i.e., they tell you about links to your blog. What I was wondering was how many blogs does Wizbang link to? A little digging through the source code gives these results:

Wizbang (Inbound Links: 234)
553 – All Links
143 – Internal Links
Total Outbound Blog Links: 410

Since I was checking my blog, I though I would look at some sites that I know have a lot of outbound links.

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Outbound Link Ratings

BlogCritics (Inbound Links: 301)
474 – All Links
107 – Internal Links
Total Outbound Blog Links: 367

InstaPundit (Inbound Links: 1561)
387- All links
45 – Internal Links
Total Outbound Blog Links: 342

Outside The Beltway (Inbound Links: 319)
456 – All Links
154 – Internal Links
Total Outbound Blog Links: 302

DailyPundit (Inbound Links: 295)
326 – All Links
46 – Internal Links
Total Outbound Blog Links: 280

Of the top 100 blogs (which I did not check from top to bottom) most of the sites have a much higher number inbound links vs. outbound links which is not terribly suprising. Other than InstaPundit, I’ve highlighted a few of the top 100 sites above that are close to a one to one ratio.

Methodology

Save the source code for a blogs main page as a text file. Use a program like TextPad to search the text file for <a href=”http://. Use the feature that allows you to mark the matches. TextPad show you the number of matches. This is your All links value. You need to subtract your internal links so change the search to <a href=”http://blogurl (replacing blogurl with your blog URL). You may need to do this search twice: with and without the www. That gives you your Internal Links total. Subtract Internal Links from All Links and you have your Total Outbound Blog Links. A quick sampling of other blogs reveals that 50-100 outbound links are about average.

There’s no easy way to correct or account for non blog outbound links, nor am I convinced it is necessary. The number of non blog links varied from 20 to 75 depending on the amount of Amazon or other commercial activity or the number of news items linked or permalinked.

Feel free to post your rating in the comments section, but for now I’m #1.

7 Comments

James Joyner August 5, 2003

Myelin does this but, unfortunately, their database seems outdated.
James Joyner August 5, 2003

Technorati keeps this data, too. So, really, what we need is a way to easily scan and aggregate the data like the TTLB Ecosystem.
Kevin August 5, 2003

I’ve tried to look at the Technorati data, but for my blog it’s always 0. Obviously that is not correct, as I’ve proved. Maybe NZ Bear will add this to the Ecosystem.
James Joyner August 5, 2003

It’s odd–I get nothing for you on the regular search but can get good data on you by reversing the process (clicking on your info via your link to OTB). See here. It shows 112 inbound blogs and 208 total inbound links.
ogged August 5, 2003

Kevin,

The way to fix that problem with technorati is to add technorati to the sites you ping with each post. Instructions for MT are here:

http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/pingConfigurations#head-47a9faa5390ea56a6c23fe7f74b4fc693f915465
Kevin August 5, 2003

I’ve had that in the ping list for the last month. My site gets indexed fine. The outbound links is a new feature, apparently it is not completly ready for prime time…
David Sifry August 5, 2003

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the outbound blogs count is still somewhat buggy, but expect to see the numbers get more accurate over time. If you still see this problem next week, drop me an email…

Dave

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