In Can I Get My Blog Noticed Without Digg’s Help? I asked whether social sites were indeed the "silver bullet" to quickly gain a large and lasting audience for a fledgling blog.  To test the theory I proposed using my own blog to measure the impact produced by different techniques.  As part of this experiment I have outlined how I plan to track changes in a blog’s popularity and how I’m planning to use active social bookmarking to promote my blog.  Unfortunately I’ve discovered that services for tracking a social site popularity metrics aren’t quite as reliable as I had hoped.

What is Wrong With This Picture?

To illustrate my point I’ll analyse results from services I have been using to track blog performance.

popuri.us provides an overview of a website’s traffic, search engine position, and social site position.  Most of the results seem plausible at first glance, but upon further investigation:

• Live Search backlinks don’t match up with results obtained by the Webmaster Live
• Technorati Links appears to be broken, when it should be returning a value of 0 instead.  A number of other entries also return N/A values instead of the 0, and may indicate this metric can no longer be retrieved.
• Overall the results are for a single URL within a site, where as the results would be more useful if they could be returned for the site as a whole.

Socialmeter  provides visibility of the social site uptake of your blog, with some additional search engine metrics to back those up.  The results are problematic:

• Delicious has not reflected the bookmark I know exists for the main website and individual posts within it.  The same comment also applies to Furl and Spurl.
• At least one post on the site has been Dugg before so the figures must only reflect a single URL not the whole site.  Metrics for the whole site would be more useful for my purposes.
• As previously mentioned the Sphere metric is not an indicator of popularity because it counts posts that might be considered to compete with yours, rather than reflecting metrics for your content.  It is almost be an inverse indicator of popularity as it shows how difficult it will be to find your site amongst all of the related content on the web.

Blog Influence provides a subset of the metrics available via popuri.us.  As you can see the Technorati metrics are no longer operational which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.  The Yahoo result is interesting but its hard to ascertain exactly which information it is retrieving from the site.  It has been steadily rising over the course of the experiment so I’d like to think it is accurate.

How Will I Track Popularity Now?

As you can see none of the services I’ve been using are reliable.  So I have to revisit how I will track popularity for the remainder of the experiment.

A new search for blog statistics sites returned iBlogstats.  It seems to provide fairly comprehensive information for blog owners, but are the results reliable?

• Delicious has not reflected the bookmark I know exists for the main website or those for individual posts within it.
• I know an individual post has been Dugg, not the main site, so the figure seems to reflect the whole site.  This is the way I’d prefer all statistics to be reported.
• Mister Wong metric doesn’t seem right.  I would have expected something within the 10 to 20 range..
• Yahoo and Live indexed page values aren’t accurate.  I also believe the Live backlink count is inaccurate.

So once again I find myself with no reliable social metrics to work with.

I had originally hoped to look for relationships between social site feedback, site metrics and site analytics.  Now that it would be extremely difficult to measure social feedback I plan to compensate for this by extracting site analytics for referrals from social sites. This is a change in tack from measuring the social site links to my blog, to measuring the effectiveness of those links (i.e. how many people wanted to visit after seeing them).  This seems entirely consistent with the experiment so I’m happy to proceed on that basis.

Next Steps

Next steps are to continue as I had planned last week.  i.e. continue active social bookmarking, monitor any progress and devise an approach for submitting posts to social news sites.  Hopefully next week I’ll have some interesting (and reliable) results to share with you!