Joe Jaffe got a book cover and many of us got link love, but was the 2k bloggers list really worth it?
In late 2006, a colleague invited me to join a compiled list of over 2000 bloggers. The purpose of this opt-in list was not clear, nor was any sort of strategy beyond gathering a pool 2000 bloggers. Why 2000? Why asap? I signed up with the hope that a purpose would appear and it only took a few days for the list to close. In the end, there were bloggers from all corners of the world; discussing subjects of all sorts.
The project authors compiled the group into a list and the flurry began. Many of the people on the list blogged about the list, each time linking to 2000 blogs. There were even several blog widgets in operation, acting as random windows to the 2k bloggers. The best insights offered on the follow-up posts were things like, “hey, I’m on there” and, “this is so much fun”. Admittedly, it was fun. To be grouped with other people and united by a medium is great! But in the end, it wasn’t much more than being listed in a phone book, or… I suppose… Google… but without all of that useful stuff, like an index to find a particular blogger or subject, or some sort of search.
Don’t get me wrong, I love random things… but here was my concern: not only did 2000 others join the list, they wrote about the list and included a link to my blog and 1999 others.
It wasn’t long before my Technorati ranks went through the roof. At the peak, my blog had reached the top 26,000 blogs on the web! I was getting link love and everybody else was too. But the truth was, I wasn’t sure how I was really doing in the rankings because I knew that most of these people were not reading my blog, participating in the dialogue, or even visiting my landing page. So was this Technorati ranking legitimate? It might have been a technical wet dream, but it left me feeling a little empty, wondering if I had effectively wiped out any sort of legitimate ranking for Radical Trust.
Before the 2k list, I was hovering between 85-100k on Technorati. After about six months, the 2k meme links disappeared from my rankings and since then I’ve dropped back to around 100k in Technorati and have stayed there since. Although my monthly traffic has increased considerably since then, I wonder if that has more to do with all of my posts and hard earned readership, and less to do with being listed amongst a couple of thousand random bloggers.
Technorati noticed this spike in many blogs and put a quick end to it. The 2kBlogger project was pulled off the web, the meme came to a close and it was over.
My take away? It is good for the ego to get those kinds of results from Technorati and other blog ranking software, but it isn’t sustainable. We can work on a system to make it sustainable, but then we would be living some sort of “inflated” link-baiting lie, leaving us with no more influence in our particular subject matter than we had before.
I’m glad I participated in the 2k blog list for this lesson alone, but I believe that influence is earned in this space, and the more link-baiting you do, the more time you spend managing the lie than you do trying to
understand the topic you blog about.
2k bloggers, I love you all, and thanks for the ride. Please tell us: What did you get out of the 2k blogger list? Have you been wrapped up in some sort of authority ranking scheme? Tell us about it!
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5 Responses to “What did you get from the 2k Bloggers list?”
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August 11th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Great point . . . Technorati “authority” is meaningless if no one is actually reading your blog. (Full disclosure . . . my blog’s “authority” sucks.) What is important is the discussion your ideas start and the connections made with people who actually like to talk about ideas.
By the way . . . Love your redesign.
August 11th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Hey Collin –
While I wasn’t on the 2K blogger list, something similar did happen to us at BlogCampaigning – an author of a book wrote a blog post thanking everyone he referenced in said book (including us). This resulted in everyone from that list repeating the list in their own blog posts. We were happy with the increase in rank for a while, but I agree with you: it doesn’t really mean anything.
You can have a ton of links and have your posts repeated and scraped for all their worth, but it doesn’t really matter until people are actively reading and engaging with them.
August 11th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Greatest. Linkbait. Ever?
Way to go, Jaffe.
August 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
hmmmm…the closest example I have is when I got 35 new twitter followers in about 10 min when someone said something mean to me on Twitter
z
August 12th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Good insight Boyd, and thanks for the kudos on the design.
Parker-
Great example. It seems like many Social Media blogs that rank people, or thank people, or simply behave as a link pool, don’t offer much.
Chris-
To be fair, it wasn’t Jaffe’s list, he was crowdsourcing his book cover at the time and thought it would work.
Zoe-
Friends under fire
Thanks for the comments… Did anybody else get something out of the 2k blogger list (or something similar) besides inflated blog rankings?