A big clean is more commonly carried out in Spring... but there's no reason not to do some in Autumn.
This indeed is what has happened to our Blog rankings. They have to some degree been completely reworked. A significant amount of dust had accumulated in certain
nooks and crannies. This needed to be attended to before we could
progress and try to improve the rankings as a whole.
So, the various Wikio teams have spent September with broom in hand and
the results are likely to ruffle a few feathers... There will surely be
some grinding of teeth (there always is: not everyone can be on top),
but the engine is now much cleaner. Several of you had noted that there
were inactive blogs
that had stuck around in the rankings, even though they had not
published for a few weeks. Well no more - they're out. Our
developers have created several indicators, one of which flags up
publication volume, that allow us to more closely follow the behaviour
of the tens of thousands of sources in our database. All such blogs who
had not published for four months have thus been jettisoned. Other
indicators were a little more difficult to implement, but now in place
they allow one to assess the similarity between sources and so address
spammers, aggregators and multiple posting (which is sometimes
legitimate, but such activity can seriously affect the analysis of
backlinks, and thus the rankings as they are based solely on this
criterion). So out also with aggregators and other sites doubling up content (a
lot of the recent work was precisely this, dealing with the enormous
presence of source duplication which is a delicate and extensive
process).
Another small change was implemented by our resident expert Jean Véronis and our development team, something which has no bearing on the overall principle, but significantly improves the transition from one month to another.
Many of you had seen that there was sometimes a yo-yo effect, whereby
blogs suddenly lose a large number of positions, or the opposite, they
shoot up the rankings like a rocket. This was largely due to the time
period used when analysing backlinks. This period as you will know is
four months, but say a blog is very heavily buzzed in April, it will
then appear high up in the rankings from May to August and then (if it
is not further talked about in the mean time), suddenly plummet in
September. Not ideal clearly. Jean thus replaced the straight four-month
calculation with a progressive attenuation over nine months. So
September's links have a value of 1, August's a value of 1 –
1/9, July's 1 – 2/9 etc. etc. The variations are now a lot more
temperate.
Before
Now
Obviously this month there will still be a lot of change in
the rankings as many things have been adjusted. The good news is that
the clearing out of moribund or spammer blogs has cleared a number of
places, and there are thus more blogs on their way up than on their way
down. We cannot yet reveal the rankings as verifications are
still being carried out, but there are some noteworthy and indeed
worthy leaps. A few falls as well but that is to be expected. The
summer entailed a drop in activity for many blogs but that is true
everywhere (you will have likely seen the report on Technorati). It is of course up for analysis, but we hope at least to have provided an improved and cleaner ranking.
As you will have seen on the Autumn Cleaning blog post, we are currently overhauling our Top Blogs algorithm in order to improve the rankings. We are taking on board a number of your suggestions and the advice of our resident expert Jean Véronis.
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