Monday, October 22, 2007

This week's blognetnews.com rankings for Utah's Political Blogs


Utah's Most Influential Political blogs

1. THE UTAH AMICUS
2. JM Bell - Militant Progressive
3. KVNU's For The People
4. Mark Towner's Political Spyglass
5. The SideTrack
6. The Deseret Spectacle
7. The Third Avenue
8. Pursuit of Liberty
9. Green Jello
10. The Senate Site
11. Part of the Plan
12. Out of Context (Utah Politics)
13. Utahania
14. Weber County Forum
15. Davis County Watch
16. GenRolly Speaking (Paul Rolly)
17. Utah State Democratic Party
18. El Cartoonista
19. Obiter Dicta by Steve
20. Reach Upward .

Check out, blognetnews.com!

Thank you!

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rob,
Congrats! Well deserved to a Great American Democrat!

Jesse Harris said...

BlogNetNews has a LOT of technical and ethical problems with it. For starters, they send illegal characters in their HTTP headers that cause our firewall at work to block access. Running a non-RFC compliant webserver is fishy business.

Then there's the PageRank stealing they engage in. Instead of appropriately linking to your site from theirs, they instead push everything through a redirect script. That means search engines can't find you by using their site.

Then let's talk about their use of content. It's one thing to be a indexing service. It's quite another thing to allow your index to be re-indexed by other sources, something they do. Do a quick Google search for the first few lines of any of your own posts. You'll find that BlogNetNews shows up in the top 10 search results, effectively using your content to boost their own search engine ranking. This kind of duplicated content can lead to having your site put into the supplemental index, a sort of purgatory for websites that appear too "spammy".

In short, they're bad news. This is why I've chosen to never be listed on their site.

Utah Conservative said...

Congratulations Rob and the whole Utah Amicus team!

A great blog, even if I don't agree with you 100% of the time.

Anonymous said...

Oy, where to start with all the problems with Jesse's comments.

First Jesse hasn't "chosen" not to be listed on BNN. We don't have sections that match his blogging interests.

Second, Jesse must have a very interesting and important business, because I know people from gas stations, newspapers and giant companies like Boeing all the way to the White House who access BNN through their work connection just fine.

On PageRank, Jesse has it exactly backward. BNN gives bloggers access to its higher page rank so their blogs are more likely to get clicked. Whenever people find a post thru google on BNN, they come to a page with only an excerpt and links to the original site.

As far as the question of indexing damaging the google rank of a blog, that's delusional. Newspapers, TV stations, and a million other web sites would be killing themselves by publishing AP, Reuters and other shared copy.

pramahaphil said...

Non-the-less congrats Rob and Crew.

It is nice to have some recognition.

Brigitte Ballard said...

Congrats!

Sorry I have been MIA for a bit, but I'll start reading again! I promise.

Kids... /sigh

Jesse Harris said...

And here's where Dave gets very embarrassed.

When you click on a link from BlogNetNews to any linked article, the server FAILS to do a HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect, the kind of redirection required in order to establish Page Rank. (Read more here.) It instead uses a META REFRESH to trick the browser into going to the site, thus there is no PageRank benefit from the link. Nice try, Dave, but some of us are smart enough to use HTTP header analyzers to figure this stuff out. You, sir, are full of it.

As for opting to be listed or not be listed, I seem to recall that there is a blog submission form to be listed. Or is Dave saying that even if you ask to be taken off, he's going to say "neener neener go ahead and make me" instead of honoring the request? Hmmm.

Skeeze-O-Meter is at full about now.

Anonymous said...

Congrats!!

Anonymous said...

Let's see ... Google's technology is private (and a lot smarter than Jesse thinks), so anyone outside Google is making educated guesses.

The educated guess Jesse points to dates from 2005, who knows how many updates to Google's methodology have occurred since then.

Mark E. Towner said...

Congrats also Rob et al @ Amicus

Note to Dave Mastio: Jesse Harris is a 60's hippie stuck in 2007. He thinks he's some kind of Internet GOD who's job it is is telling everyone else what they are doing wrong. Well guess what Jessie, have you figured out how I send out my email yet? Have you listed the email addresses your stole yet? Interesting that a bulk email was sent out by Free Capitalist promoting vouchers, I wonder where they got their list Mr. Harris. You claim to be so Internet savvy concerning email, spam, and everything else. You are a little baby. Oh and how's UTOPIA doing?, about as well as IProvo?

Spyglass

Jesse Harris said...

You are a little baby.

... says the make-believe pirate.

Bradley Ross said...

Rob, it looks like you've got a broken link at the top of your post above the list.

There is little doubt that the Amicus belongs near the top of the Utah blog influence list, but some of the other rankings are a bit sketchy to me. Steve U. doesn't make the list, but Obiter Dicta, which hasn't had an update since March is 19--above Reach Upward which is one of the best political blogs in the state?

The rankings are currently fun but not fully trustworthy.

Jesse Harris said...

Dave: I just looked through the backlinks to Utah Amicus. Guess how many came from BlogNetNews? Precisely zero. In other words, you don't pass a link across recognized by search engines just like I said, not to mention that you cloak the referrer field so that nobody knows traffic comes from your site.

Shady stuff.