As I noted early this week, there's a lot to be desired from blog ranking and measurement tools. Technorati's measure of influence via links is the most common method used, followed closely by Alexa data (which can be badly skewed, particularly when the URL is inside a much larger host).

At SEOmoz, we used several key indicators of value - links, subscribers, tagging and traffic to compile the following comparative list of bloggers in the SEO space:

Influence Score URL
0 https://spaces.msn.com/search-science/blog/
48 https://equitymind.blogspot.com/
61 https://searchquant.blogspot.com/
77 https://www.searchrank.com/blog/
77 https://thelinkspiel.blogspot.com/
89 https://www.chinawhite.net/
95 https://mcanerin.blogspot.com/
105 https://www.insearchofstuff.com/
133 https://www.mikegrehan.com/
134 https://www.grayhatnews.com/
162 https://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm
170 https://www.fantomaster.com/fantomNews/
180 https://www.seoresearchlabs.com/blog/
182 https://www.oilman.ca/
192 https://www.cre8pc.com/blog/
202 https://www.seobythesea.com/
213 https://www.seo-scoop.com
233 https://www.linkbuildingblog.com/
233 https://www.socialpatterns.com/
302 https://www.webguerrilla.com/
312 https://www.jimboykin.com/
327 https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/
374 https://www.marketingpilgrim.com/
388 https://www.wolf-howl.com/
406 https://www.searchengineblog.com/
419 https://moz.com/blog.php
463 https://www.traffick.com/
493 https://www.stuntdubl.com/
657 https://blog.v7n.com/
693 https://jensense.com/
1,269 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
1,316 https://www.seobook.com/
1,322 https://www.threadwatch.org/
1,540 https://www.seroundtable.com/
1,904 https://blog.clickz.com/
2,178 https://performancing.com/
2,538 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
2,754 https://blog.searchenginewatch.com
2,805 https://www.resourceshelf.com/
2,833 https://blog.outer-court.com/
2,933 https://battellemedia.com/
3,001 https://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/
3,038 https://scobleizer.wordpress.com/
3,874 https://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt

My feeling is that the data we've compiled is not particularly valuable, though it may work well for some comparative purposes. The score above is based on Alexa reach data, Alexa page views, Technorati links, Yahoo! links (to the direct blog URL only), the number of del.icio.us tags and the number of subscribers via Bloglines.

Is Todd Malicoat really 5X more influential than Shak? Is Michael Gray 10X more influential than Joe Morin? These aren't questions with solid answers and I'm not sure that the data above, even if we were to come up with a better equation for the final product, is really valuable for making these types of assumptions.

What this formula does show that I like is a relatively accurate picture of daily readership. My guess is that with a few exceptions, an exact traffic-measured pattern of each site would follow at least the ordering, if not the exact percentages. For example, I'd guess that Jeremey Zawodny and Robert Scoble are slightly better read than John Battelle and Philip Lenssen, and that Donna Fontenot and Bill Slawski get very similar levels of traffic.

Perhaps, in the future, someone will develop a tool that can query enough sources of data and account for enough variables to make this process more valuable. For now, however, we won't be pursuing a tool to automate this kind of comparison and analysis... the value just isn't there.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on automated blog comparisons, though and how you feel about the value of the data. For those interested, the full spreadsheet in OpenOffice 2.0 format is available online.