Sunday, 15 April 2007
Doctor Dale's Facebook
I'm beginning to wonder whether or not Iain Dale is a bit of a size queen when it comes to blogging. The exceptionally long blogroll (better measured in number of screens rather than links) and the belief that comment volume is indicative of both popularity and quality are two obvious indications of this near obsession. Now we can add another, the number of Facebook friends.
In this post Iain gloats about the number of friends he has on Facebook.
Hazel sadly has fewer friends on Facebook than I do - a mere 272. With your help we can show that she has so many more friends in the Conservative Party than she does in her own. Oh yes. We all want her to win, don't we?The first point to note is that a Facebook friend isn't necessarily a proper friend in the Real World meaning of the word. A better term would be loose aquaintance, though that doesn't sound as cool. If Iain is using number of Facebook friends as a measure of his popularity, then the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Iain and his chums could do with getting out more.
What this really reveals is Iain's fascination with volume over quality. And that misses a crucial point regarding blogging; that the quality of inbound links is just as important (if not moreso) than the volume. If you want to improve the pagerank of your blog, don't simply follow Iain's lead and push for a large volume of inbound links (and don't spam other bloggers as part of this effort), but instead aim for quality inbound links from blogs and sites with a good pagerank. A few thousand links from site with an average pagerank between 6 and 7 is preferable to ten thousand links or more from sites with an average pagerank of 3 or 4.
In blogging quality counts just as highly as quantity, a lesson you probably wouldn't learn from the Iain Dale School of Blogging.
Labels: blogging, iain dale the expert, iain dale the spammer, links
Posted by Clive @ | Permalink
6 Comments:
- Aaron said...
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I did take issue with this on Iain's site. He didn't approve the comment. Possibly for matters of taste, I'm not sure.
11:20 AM, April 15, 2007 - Tim said...
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This is interesting. I was talking with someone about links and PageRank this morning...
10:08 PM, April 15, 2007
[dramatic sting]
... and it wasn't Clive.
One of the key points made was quality over quantity. - Paul Linford said...
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Irrespective of the wider issues around blog regulation etc, I am really unsure as to why you make such an issue of the length of Iain's blogroll, Tim.
12:24 PM, April 16, 2007
You choose to keep your own blogroll fairly short, and I'm sure you have your own good reasons for that. Iain has a very long one, partly he sought to build up the traffic on his blog using reciprocal links as many others have done, but also because he has sought to build a large network of local Tory bloggers around his blog - hardly surprising given his political ambitions.
A lot of those bloglinks are to the kind of very localised blogs that you or I wouldn't give the time of day to, but I think we have to recognise that just as there is no single uniform way of doing blogging - well, isn't that the idea of it after all? - there is no single uniform way of building up a blogroll. - Tim said...
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Because it's ridiculous... and a clear symptom of primitive and selfish thinking.
1:19 PM, April 16, 2007
FFS, even the shortest post takes an age to load because every damn page has over 400 lines of links to display!
The absurd length of the blogroll makes most link exchanges a bit of a one-sided deal, IMO. - Paul Linford said...
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Call me naive Tim, but when compiling my own (long-ish) blogroll I simply included all sites that I thought were worthy of a link, and I add and delete as new ones emerge and others become dormant. Would you advise that, for usability reasons, bloggers should put some sort of upper limit on the number of outward links, and if so, what sort of ballpark figure would this be?
1:09 PM, April 17, 2007 - Tim said...
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Paul, to give you an idea of scale:
1:17 PM, April 17, 2007
If you were to print any page from Iain's site, it would go to 19 pages (formerly 24).
Most blogs would print out a maximum of 4 or 5.
I don't think I need to set an ideal/upper limit to be able to call Iain's blogroll excessive... and therefore highly diluted.
