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 | | Links to this post
