Receptional’s Blogger Countdown – Why we chose Klout

Submitted by Bradford Jordan on Tue, 22/11/2011 - 15:02

In our recent countdown of the Top 50 SEO Bloggers of 2011, several people have questioned our choice of ranking methodology.

There could have been many ways to rank each of the bloggers – best post, most traffic etc. but in the end we chose to rank the bloggers in terms of their Klout score, a simple measure of how influential they are online, across their social networks.

Receptional Klout Score

We felt that Klout is a much better measurement of how influential you are in your space than say, your follower count. We rejected measuring blog traffic stats or links too, as these can favour someone who has put more time into their own SEO than others, thus making their blog appear more influential than it really is.

Whist Klout is far from perfect, those who have put time into their ‘personal SEO’, i.e. those who are followed, re-tweeted, and engaging most with peers online are the ones high on our list of the Top SEO Bloggers of 2011.

So there you have it! You can see each part of our list at the links below, and if you’ve got any suggestions for next time around, do let us know in the comments section below!

SEO bloggers part 1 - 50-41

SEO bloggers part 2 - 40-31

SEO bloggers part 3 - 30-21

SEO bloggers part 4 - 20-11

SEO bloggers part 5 - 10-1

About the author: Bradford Jordan

Brad Jordan is Receptional's Head of Social Media Marketing and Communication. Follow Brad on Twitter @bradj, or connect on LinkedIn and Google+. Brad also blogs at bradj.co.uk.

Position: Social Media Consultant

Bradford Jordan's blog

Comments

Choice of 'bloggers'

Submitted by Simon Heseltine (not verified) on Wed, 23/11/2011 - 21:40

My question isn't about using klout as a scoring methodology, but more about the choices that were made.

If Mike Grehan is a blogger, then so is every person who writes for Search Engine Watch. If you were looking at the editorial staff, which seems to kind of be the case for Search Engine Land, then why no Jonathan Allen or Danny Goodwin? If you're looking at people who cover the news, the why no Miranda Miller or Rob D. Young from sew?

I know it's hard to make these lists, but it would be interesting if you defined exactly what you considered as selection criteria.

Thanks

Submitted by Submitcube (not verified) on Fri, 09/12/2011 - 06:37

Thanks Simon, I am really agree with you. Your comment is superb.Thanks for posting this.

You do realize though that

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 23/11/2011 - 21:56

You do realize though that some of these top blogs of 2011 you link to have exactly zero posts from 2011?

I kinda stopped looking once I saw how off-base this was. That you used Klout scores to see how your friends ranked pretty well explains the outdated list.