John Chow: Web Detective! (Or, How I Discovered ReviewMe’s Busted Algo Was to Blame)
by Tony Hung on November 12, 2006
Many thanks to John “Dot com Mogul”, and fellow Canadian, Chow who took my whiny braying to heart, and decided to do some investigative blogging to sort out why ReviewMe was giving me the metaphorical middle finger.
It turns out that their method of vetting sites is about as good as their method of assigning dollar values to the per-post cost of each blogger’s shill review.
Check out John’s assessment, but basically, its broken imperfect on a number of levels. It imperfectly reads the number of technorati inbound links, which gave him a lame-duck value of $100, when in fact, it should probably be closer to the $250 mark; he’s got more than 1000 inbound links which should probably put in him in the rank of 1000′s with Technorati. On the other hand, he says he’s got problems claiming his blog, which may be the real source of that problem (and Technorati’s ability to respond to email is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish).
The other thing he found was more helpful:
On the other hand, he notes that anyone can claim a blog. In the long run, this probably is more of a administrative headache than anything else, as it blocks the real blogger from claiming his or her blog. Interestingly enough, he was able to claim MY blog, and prove that the algo ranking is inconsistent, because he was able to succeed!
In other news, trying to claim TechCrunch was similarly unsuccessful, so I guess I should be pleased I’m in some good company.
ReviewMe clearly has some bugs to iron out, and I hope it does, because these errors currently provide some real room for abuse. Example: they assign blogs from blogger.com an inordinately high score because of the root domain name rank, not the actual blog rank. Penalizing people with their own domains? Shocking!
Addendum – I have since added my blog, and it seems to work! Again, many thanks to John Chow.
9 comments
Hey Tony, thanks for the feedback, we are still ironing all these bugs out and will keep ironing until it’s perfect! ;) Patrick
by Patrick Gavin on November 12, 2006 at 1:30 pm. #
Hey Patrick,
Thanks for noticing — and believe me, we’ll keep on yammering until you do! :)
by Tony on November 12, 2006 at 1:46 pm. #
You are welcome. I’m more than happy to help out a fellow Canadian. Ya, looking at it now, I can see I got ripped of on the Technoranti score. I should have received 4 stars for that, which may have boosted my overall ranking to 4 stars, which means $250 for a review. Oh well.
Hopefully, Technoranti tech support will get back to me soon on why I can’t claim my blog.
by John Chow on November 12, 2006 at 7:18 pm. #
I don’t know, it seems the pricing is all over the board — no real consistant metric for pricing. Any way, I still can’t believe site owners feel it is a good value to spend $250 or more for a link. There are so many other cost effective alternatives these days.
by Arnie on November 13, 2006 at 1:19 am. #
yup — the algo’s busted — errr, not perfect.
There may be other cost effective (read: free) ways to get traffic, but if you’ve got money, there’s probably no quicker way or efficient way.
by Tony on November 13, 2006 at 1:53 am. #
John — good luck with that. Let us know how it turns out! :)
(I’m not holding my breath)
Cheers
t @ dji
by Tony on November 13, 2006 at 1:54 am. #
I am not holding mine either!
by John Chow on November 13, 2006 at 5:36 am. #
Success! I have claimed my blog at Technorati and now it reflects my true rank. Rank: 3,346 (1,265 links from 593 blogs)
Too bad this was done after the ReviewMe review. Oh well. :)
by John Chow on November 15, 2006 at 4:28 am. #
Hey, that’s great.
Don’t worry — I think they update your status every month. You’ll be in the 250 club in no time ;)
by Tony on November 15, 2006 at 8:52 am. #