2000 Bloggers Is Gone, Probably for the Best

On Feb. 2, I wrote about my concerns regarding Tino Buntic's now-popular 2000 Bloggers meme. Basically, it seemed to have become a link farm. Buntic left a comment refuting those concerns, but I remained skeptical.

Then yesterday, the Technorati blog published a post explaining why they'd just implemented an algorithm to filter out the effects of 2000 bloggers and similar efforts on bloggers' Technorati ranking. After reading that, I left a comment on Tino's blog, basically saying thanks but no thanks -- I wanted off the 2000 Bloggers list.

Just a few minutes ago, Buntic took down the 2000 bloggers collage of linked photos. I think this was probably wise, and I hope that everyone who posted that collage to their own site follows suit. Right now, Technorati merely nullified the effect of this inadvertent link farm -- later, other aggregators and search engines might opt to actually penalize participants, regardless of intentions.

Is that fair? The hard answer to that, I think, is: Yes...

Link farms are a real problem because they skew search results and rankings. We rely on relevance to make the web work.

Therefore, even if you post a pre-set list of links with the purest and most benevolent intentions, search engines and aggregators can't account for your intentions. This is why individually compiled blog rolls can be a positive thing -- but link farms are not.

If you genuinely want to help your fellow bloggers, the very best approach is to link to them, comment on their blogs, link to them in social media services like Digg and del.icio.us, and include them in your blog roll if you have one. Such "organic" activity really does pay off. It just takes time, and consistent effort. The problem with 2000 bloggers is that it tried to take a serious shortcut around how the web works.

...More on the 2000 blogger problems from Jeremiah Owyang and Zoli.

Comments

[Ed Reif]

Dear Revenge of the end user
I did read your post.
At least I thought I did.
What part of "This isn't fair" didn't I get
Hugs

Ed

[Dawud Miracle]

I don't think that the 2000 Bloggers meme was such a big deal. I did introduce a number of new bloggers to my blog. Now it's up to me to keep them interested by writing good content.

What I don't get is this emphasis on the Technorati ranking system in the first place.