Andreas’ Top 50 Cycling Blogs

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.

9 Comments

  1. I like the aggregation you do because it allows me to follow only one site and not miss out on a ton of interesting stuff by doing so.

  2. Well, I linked back *before* I saw this post 😛

    I, too, like the links… they make it seem like I find eerything first to my friends 🙂 but if the price of the spam stamp means cutting back a tad, so be it.

  3. Speaking of Google (your post), I happened to come upon your site while looking for my blog in cycling results. Truly enjoyed your post. Keep up the good work…
    Cheers ~ John

  4. Hey Richard, surprise, surprise. I am the webmaster of cyclebetting.com.The guy you hate so much. Let me first point out that I 100% understand your point of view.I also would like to point out that I do NOT scrape any site what so ever. All I do is “use” RSS feeds and auto import them, that is all.

    My goal is absolutely not to make money or anything. My reward is just to get as many visitors as possible and trick Google as much as I can. However I do realize I annoy the crap out of webmasters, simply because I rank way better than their original piece of work. That was never my goal. All I wanted to do was to see how far you can go with regards to tricking Google. I must say: I am still surprised that Google hasnt penalized me as of yet.

    If you want I am willing to get into the whole matter with you in more detail and give you a few pieces of advice in order to protect yourself and maybe inform other webmaster how to protect themselves from “thieving excrement” like myself.
    You can get in contact with me via: webmaster@cyclebetting.com

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