Blog Report: Grading The Local Blogosphere

I thought I’d do something a little different this week, and see how well some of the bigger names in our local blogosphere rank up against each other. In part, I decided to do this as an attempt to see how SpartanburgSpark.com stacked up against the competition. I also wanted to have some kind of idea what the scale.

After all, I have a basic idea how well the Spark is doing, but I have no clue how popular and successful the Spartanburg Herald-Journal‘s GoUpstate.com is, for instance. And since they’re the biggest, most well-funded local site with no shortage of content — not to mention a daily paper and billboard advertisements to spread the world, they were the obvious site to compare to. By all rights, if any site represents the best-case-scenario on the local level, it should be that one.

Next, I stacked in the less-popular SparkleCityBlogs.com, since I can compare various traffic stats against my Google Analytics reports for the site. I also added in a new site, the Community Journal chain’s JournalWatchdog.com, and one of the more established local blogs, SeedingSpartanburg.com.

So, how’d they stack up? I tried a variety of website-analyzing services to find out.

Technorati.com

Technorati.com is the closest thing the internet has to a universally accepting blog-rating service, being one of the first such groups in the blogosphere as a whole. Their rankings are based on both total web traffic (out of the well-over 100 million blogs the site tracks), and on “Authority,” which is the number of blogs (not links) that refer to the site in question. A site with an Authority of 9, like SpartanburgSpark.com, has had nine other Technorati-tracked blogs linking to it in the last six months. It’s a good way of seeing how well-connected a

1. SeedingSpartanburg.com: Rank: 349,152; Authority: 17 (Way to go, Tammy!)
2. SpartanburgSpark.com: Rank: 612,601; Authority: 9 (Not bad, all things considered.)
3. SparkleCityBlogs.com: Rank: 966,781; Authority: 5 (Ironic, consider all this site is composed of is links to other blogs. You’d think they’d return the favor.)
4. GoUpstate.com: N/A (GoUpstate.com doesn’t have a Technorati listing, although several of their stories show up in other blogs.)
5. JournalWatchdog.com: N/A (JournalWatchdog.com doesn’t have a Technorati listing.)

Alexa.com

Alexa.com measures only a single aspect of a website: Traffic. It’s generally fairly reliable, although it’s useless when it comes to telling you what that traffic actually means. One thing it is very useful for, however, is indicating blog growth.

1. GoUpstate.com: Rank 57,442 (Interestingly, their total number of page views are down by 3 percent in the last three months, with overall page rank dropping by 3,479.)
2. SpartanburgSpark.com: Rank 2,423,227 (Page views show a 20 percent increase in the last three months, and overall page rank skyrocketing by 1,883,882 places. Any day now, we’ll be in the top million websites in the world.)
3. JournalWatchdog.com: Rank 3,228,973 (The site is new, so there’s no data from the last three months to compare anything to.)
4. SparkleCityBlog.com: 19,805,751 (Sad news, I’m afraid. The site has dropped by 5,250,375 ranks in the last three months. Evidently, the world at large doesn’t care about our local blogosphere here in Spartanburg.)
5. SeedingSpartanburg.com: N/A (Evidently, Alexa.com hasn’t been tracking the site. I’m not sure why this is.)

Grader.com

While their ranking algorithm leaves a lot of variables ouf of the equation, focusing instead on how widely known a site is rather than how active it is, Grader.com’s website grader does at least over a standard by which we can compare some local sites on their net-worthiness.

1. GoUpstate.com: 91 (Ranked well in Alexa.com for overall traffic, although earned a few tut-tuts for having too many images and a slow load time.)
2. SpartanburgSpark.com: 80 (Big issues were few Digg.com posts and too many Meta keywords. A second scan turned in a result of 78 for some reason.)
3. JournalWatchdog.com: 70 (Lots of little issues, low traffic score, no Technorati rank.)
4. SparkleCityBlogs.com: 55 (Evidently, Grader.com doesn’t think much of our local blog aggregator.)
5. SeedingSpartanburg.com: 50 (Lack of meta tag content and Grader’s seeming inability to find the site’s Technorati stats were the reason this blog was rated poorly. Yet SeedingSpartanburg.com is actually the highest-rated local blog I know of on Technorati, so this is clearly a fail on Grader.com’s part.)

WebsiteOutlook.com

Lastly, we have WebsiteOutlook.com, one of any number of website “value” determining engines on the internet. I picked this one because it uses metrics that usually land the value in the ballpark the sites are generally valued at by investors. It’s not precise, but it’s at least a standard.

1. GoUpstate.com: Estimated Worth $39383.50 (Based on overall traffic and an estimated $53.95 per day in web ad revenue.)
2. SpartanburgSpark.com: Estimated Worth $1606 (Based on an estimated $2.20 in daily web ad revenue. Eerily accurate.)
3. SparkleCityBlogs.com: Estimated Worth $876 (Based on an estimated $1.20 in daily web ad revenue. Wild over-estimation. It’s more like 50 cents a week.)
4. JournalWatchdog.com: Estimated Worth $817.6 (Based on an estimated $1.12 in daily ad revenue.)
5. SeedingSpartanburg.com: N/A (Again, no tracking info.)

So what did we learn here? The highest-rated local blog on the most-known and most-reliable blog tracker, SeedingSpartanburg.com on Technorati, failed to register at all on many of the sites. Several of the sites run by newspaper insiders failed to even have Technorati.com listings. None of the local websites are worth very much, and the only one that comes close — GoUpstate.com — returns barely enough to pay one employee minimum wage.

Of course, you can’t take this stuff all that seriously. These are blind stabs in the dark by sites that fail to measure anything beyond publically available stats and whatever can be gleaned from the underlying details hidden in the sites themselves. It’s hard to say how accurate any of it is, although I will say that the depiction of the Spark is relatively accurate.

Here’s where the fun starts. If you’re a blogger, run your site through these same engines and tell us what you find.