Breaking Down the Ad Age Power150
The last few days, I've been spending a little time researching the ins and outs of the AdAge Power 150 blog rankings. If you don't know (and you should), the Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language blogs in the world. It was developed by Todd Andrlik and currently ranks hundreds of blogs written about everything related to marketing and PR.
Like most companies, we are always trying to improve ourselves and one of our ongoing goals is to raise our ranking in the Power 150. So, I did a little research on the Power 150 to better understand how to help the LevelTen Interactive blog climb the ranks.
The AdAge Power 150 point scale is broken down into five categories.
- Todd Points (1 to 15): As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd Andrlik values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content as well as unique visual appearance and style. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd Points.
- PostRank (1 to 50): PostRank is a service that measures the active engagement of your blog posts. By tracking sources such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, Google, comments and page views (among other things), PostRank can measure how well your blog does on a post-by-post basis. The Power150 takes a composite score of all your posts in the past 30 days and then scales it to provide a relative measure of how well you've been doing recently.
- Yahoo InLinks (1 to 30): Much like Technorati's InLinks count, Yahoo uses its Site Explorer to tabulate the number of links to a particular blog. We then scale this number down to a 30-point scale.
- Alexa Points (1 to 25): Alexa ranks sites with an algorithm that incorporates page views and reach (the percentage of all web users who have visited that particular site). For the Power 150, we take that rank and assign it a proportional score between 1 and 25 and factor it into a blog's total score.
- Collective Intellect (0 to 30): Collective Intellect is a social media analytics company that works with brands to evaluate consumer opinion, measure buzz, identify customer sentiment and manage corporate reputations at the industry, company, brand, campaign and messaging levels. For the Power 150, Collective Intellect's authority ranking uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate an author's authority on a topic, including such measures as link-analysis between on-topic posts, topic density, author's percent of contribution to the topic, number of comments and post quality.
- Creation PostRank identifies this as the "strongest form of engagement" and uses the example of blogging. Creation activley generates conversation, which is the reasoning behind being highly engaging.
- Critiquing Responding to creations of others is immensely important. It's also a form of conversation, but understandably below creation.
- Chatting This is where social media and the like come into play. This requires a small action at first; a simple click can share an article. Again, conversation usually ensues, indicating a good level of engagement.
- Collecting Less engaging than chatting, this could mean bookmarking or simply sharing an article without getting too involved discussing it.
- Clicking And we're back to page views. Reading is the most simple form of engagement and, while important, it doesn't hold much value without stemming conversation.
