Our Jupiter Research research study got some nice play when Steve Rubel referenced it yesterday in a post about how Google PageRank is the ultimate way to determine a blogger’s influence.
This was hardly the first time Google has been equated with influencer gold. But I couldn’t help chuckling as I recalled Steve’s take a year ago that link authority is “meaningless”, and that “crowd-sourcing” has replaced links as the new way to measure influence. Now it appears the pendulum has swung back the other way. According to Steve, the blogosphere is more influential than social networks due to its linking ethos and impact on SEO. He argues, “Google is the gateway to all content people want to find.” Ergo, PageRank is the new ultimate influence barometer.
Well, you’re getting closer Steve. Links are powerful, but counting them doesn’t tell you much about how content is influencing people. Case in point: a blogger gets 2 links to a post she wrote on the current economy and 5 to her local restaurant review. The review is linked by her friends’ blogs, who typically write about other topics. The economic commentary is linked in by 2 popular political blogs who also wrote posts which prop up the original author’s point. Now, the link-juice of this blog overall could propel it to the top of a Search Engine Results Page for the restaurant name – but does that mean this person is influential on local hotspots or a type of cuisine? Not necessarily. A high PageRank promises accessibility, which fosters popularity – a component to what makes someone influential for sure. But that merely gets you on the radar screen of new readers – it doesn’t make you more or less influential over an audience. And what about content itself? Most authors blog about multiple subjects, so you must understand what someone is influential about. In the above example, our blogger may regularly publish on economic issues, whereas her restaurant review was a one-time thing. By understanding the nature of the linking relationships in each case, we get a broader view of how her content on two different subjects may resonate. How powerful is the concept of topic expertise? Our study found that for those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus were key sources.
A final point to highlight: the idea that Google is and will forever remain the gateway to all content. It turns out that links themselves can give search a run for its money with certain audiences. Jupiter concluded that for frequent blog readers, links beat search as a navigation tool: 38 percent said blog links were tops for discovering new blog content as compared to 34 percent who said search. If readers are accessing blog content through the recommendations of other blogs (not to mention links from other sources like mainstream media or Twitter), does Google still get the credit for being the ultimate barometer of influence?