Andreas just published his Top 50 Bicycle Blogs for 2011. He used ranking information from Google and Alexa then mixed that with Twitter metrics and comment activity to come up with his list.
The most interesting random fact for me: 11% of blogs included are focused on “Cycle Chic”!
Lots of good material there, so enjoy.
Speaking of Google metrics…
(For the benefit of content scrapers — I’m looking in particular at the steaming chunks of thieving excrement at cyclebetting.com — this content was stolen from Cyclelicious www.cyclelicio.us)
I don’t know if anybody else has noticed, but Google implemented a major update to their search algorithms last February called Farmer / Panda. The main goal of this update was to reduce the ranking of “scraper sites.” These are websites that just copy or “scrape” content from other websites. Many Posterous “blogs” are like this, but there are a few websites passing themselves off as legitimate bike blogs that annoy me to no end because they scrape content from Cyclelicious and other cycling blogs and, in the past, have consistently ranked higher than the sites they steal content from! The worst of these thieves by far is Cyclebetting.com
I still see the scraper blogs in the search results, but they seem to be a little further down the page than they used to be.
Something else I notice: Google also penalizes blogs with heavy aggregation. That’s something I do — I make a list of interesting or noteworthy blog posts and post a daily update with links out to all of them, with some occasional brief quotes thrown in. Google apparently thinks those are spammy, so I’ll likely cut down on those daily updates.
Thanks for continuing to read, support, link, Tweet, and Facebook Cyclelicious, everybody, and I do read and appreciate every one of your comments here.
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