Got it slightly wrong.
I was just working on some aspects of the PowerPR index – or whatever I’m going to call it cos I don’t like that name any longer – and suddenly had a slightly uncomfortable feeling that my ‘Which metric is the most important’ may not have been strictly correct.
I just added up the figures I posted, and the average for Technorati Authority is not, as I claimed, 9.4. If you simply copy those figures I posted, paste them into a spreadsheet and average out the differences, it comes to 4.81.
It looks like I got everything right up until the very last equation for averaging the differences. This is akin to Deep Thought getting to the very last calculation when figuring out the meaning of life, and screwing up ‘what do you get if you multiply six by nine’ to get 42.
I can only apologise for this. I got a lot of hits on that post and was quite pleased with the analysis.
So the actual variances pan out like this (believe me, I’ve checked and double- and triple-checked these, and then some):
Looking at these figures, they tell me that Technorati Authority is the best predictor of performance as it is the lowest figure. That is, a blog would only change places, on average, around 5 times if I ranked purely according to Technorati Authority. And now, I see that Yahoo Inlinks, far from being the most accurate predictor as originally stated, is in fact the least. Ouch.
If none of this means anything to you then I suggest you take a look at the original posting, complete with contrite edits. I felt I needed to clarify my position here because that post actually got the most hits of any post I’ve ever made. Which means I’ve now made a fool of myself in front of a record number of people. At least I’m an honest fool.
In fact, I’m so honest that if anyone would like to see the calculations I used for these figures then please just ask.
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Brendan,
Honest – yes. Foolish – no.
Do a community service – yes.
Much appreciated by all your readers – For sure!
Thanks. I did feel a bit of an arse when I realised, but at least I fixed it.
Just another comment: I find it slightly galling that this ‘Oops’ post has been by quite some way my most popular post ever…
[...] I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the metric that seems most accurately to determine position in the index – Technorati Authority – and see how the blogs in the index have fared [...]
[...] what to do? Reduce the metrics, given that Technorati Authority pretty much governs the rankings? Or reduce the number of blogs in the index? Or just give [...]