Blog matching service PubSub has introduced LinkStats, a very cool statistics tool that enables you to see the inbound and outbound links to and from your (or any) blog.
Once you enter a blog URL, it will return the results for the past 30 days. Not only do you get a text table listing inbound/outbound links by day, but you also see the information in graph format, making it easy to see at a glance how your (or any) blog is doing from a broad connectivity/linking point of view.
To give you an idea, you can see how my blog, NevOn, looks. You can try it out on your, or any other, blog here.
Make sure you read this text at the foot of the web page when you run the stats:
PLEASE NOTE: LinkCounts are based on the content of a site’s feed(s). Some feeds only publish summaries (or even just headlines) that do not contain links. We are constantly working to improve the resolution and accuracy of our published statistics. At times we may feel that our changes are significant enough to warrant reprocessing of some or all of our historical "raw" data. These changes will most likely result in the removal and regeneration of our published historical data.
The text in bold is my highlight emphasis.
Here’s the point – if your RSS feed is purely a short extract or just a headline, and not a full-content feed, you will just waste your time using this stats service. As the text says, the stats are based on the content of a site’s feed(s). So if your less-than-full RSS feed doesn’t contain links, nothing will be shown in PubSub’s stats. If what you’ve published on your blog contains those links, then you’ll be doing yourself a disservice as clearly the reality of your linking wouldn’t be reflected in PubSub’s stats. The service measures your feed, not what’s posted on your blog.
Another good reason to publish your RSS feed as a full-content feed.
And as I’ll keep saying, it’s all about the linking.
(Hat tip: Steve Rubel)
Great PubSub link measurement tool
This is a great tool from PubSub. A measurement tool for inbound and outbound links. Take a look at my link details with nice graphs and a lot of detailed info. It is still buggy they say but nevertheless I think it gives a lot of information. The RSS …
Even better, Neville, is the fact that the link stats has an RSS feed attached. I noticed that on the forimmediaterelease.biz site there were no outlinks displayed – I’m having this same problem with my site. I wondered if it was an EE problem but I checked shel’s blog and it does have outlinks. Must be something wrong with the feeds, do you know which feed in particular it uses, atom or RSS2.0?
That’s a good question, Richard, re the FIR blog. I’ll look into it. Thanks for pointing it out.