Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Once a week Weblogs Inc releases their “best of Weblogs Inc.” post which they then use to show off content to other sites in the network.

It’s a great way to introduce people from one site to quality content on another site.

The question is whether it’s used to game PageRank/Technorati/Feedster/TailRank. One main problem all these systems has it trying to determine ownership authority. (Though I’m sure Google has long ago implemented automatic and manual systems to fight this problem).

A trivial approach would be to assume that anything under foo.com is the same owner. Therefore any links from foo.com linking to foo.com would be excluded. PageRank easily takes this into consideration. One exception are sites which have a high amount of flow which could be used to boost each other.

For example the following links:

http://opensource.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000960063473
http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000960063473
http://droxy.com/2005/10/15/after-a-long-hard-week-its-time-for-the-best-of-the-weblogs-in

all link to:

http://engadget.com/entry/1234000400062418

Now of course if you were to manually map these to the same owner you could merge these into one link which I think is more fair.

It’s not so much that the links are invalid its that they weren’t created by 3rd (and independent) parties. If this was a natural link created because of high quality content this would be one thing. The fact that Weblogs Inc. is creating these links once a week is another.

Update:

An here’s the main question. Should a product like TailRank (which is designed to rank nodes) suppress this type of content? Only one link from a given owner? I’m not so sure. I think that within the network there might be valid links to other properties. The question is whether it’s done to deliberately boost links.

Maybe one approach is to ignore links which are created from ALL properties from Weblogs Inc. Then of course you open yourself to an N-1 attack. Dampening the links might really be the only approach.