Invesp Consulting managed to put together a ranking list of 150 General Travel Blogs without my (and Gary’s) help.
I’m excited. Ever since I saw Happy Hotelier listed on one of them ranking lists, starting with the T-List, I got interested in lists. For some time I’ve tried to keep up with lists of travel bloggers according to their technorati ranking. I’ve tried to combine same with Alexa ranking, but as I did it by hand it took a lot (actually too much) of time and effort.
In May I found myself number one on the Invesp Hotel Blogs ranking. I really hoped that they soon would come with a travel blog ranking and offered them help to speed it up. Then I could stop the tally work by hand. On the other hand the ranking and listing posts get a lot of interest. If you look at my side bar: My last year’s Happy Haloween post is my most commented ever…
We have seen other lists and comments as well: Many are of the opinion that a panel and/or public voting doesn’t reflect true reach of a travel blog. Let alone the mere technorati ranking or the mere Alexa ranking that I posted about recently….
In an update to this post I will analyze the list more in depth. In the meantime I decided to put my bragging badge in my sidebar.
Some Obeservations, updating this post from time to time:
- Khalid who seems responsible for the project blogs about it in How Does Blog Rank calculate the ultimate rank? and explains that they use 20+ parameters which they mix together with a different weight. Here I saw that Gary was also offering him help.
- In view of the already over 1,000 members of the TBex community, I have a feeling that 150 blogs is a meager number. Also obviously no foreign language blog while I know there is a huge Spanish language travel blog community spread over several continents
- I’m missing various blogs – Uptake – Velvet Escape – Lonely Planet – Gadling – Gridskipper – Hotelchatter – My Marrakech to name a few …and I will come up with more…
- With 150 on the list it is very hard to sort and sift through it
- All in all on first sight I have a slight feeling this list cannot put aside my tedious handwork…
Congratulations on your ranking! You remain king of hotel bloggers 😉
Yes, I like this list more than others I’ve seen. Statistically ranking blogs is a difficult thing to do, but Invesp seems to include the important factors: unique visitors, pagerank, subscribers, links, and so on.
If you can get your rss feed sorted out you’ll near me and soon pass me:-)
But they communicate not very easy with. Also the refreshment rate is not so clear. Most importantly it seems they don’t know the travelbloggers niche so very well….
Off topic I Have the SEO book tool bar installed in the meantime for FF which is helpful indeed.
congrats on your ranking! that is awesome!
i was surprised at the numbers that they had for our site. none of them match up with our stats that we get from several different sources. Our main stats come from our website’s stats (AWstats and Webalyzer), as well as from google analytics, and are much, much higher than invesp. we’ll see how it all falls out over the next few months, though.
Both the update rate and accuracy of the numbers don’t seem to always tally. But the idea is very good if they can iron out these wrinkles.
it seems that the comments are not always working on the blog. You might want to look into that. I was trying to post a comment and took me to a blank page.
lol, of course I forgot to post my original comment!
congrats on the ranking. I found invesp list of travel blogs when searching Google, then I found your blog post. I guess I am not sure how their list compares to well established services such as technorati. What do you think?
Hmm.. the Invesp list isn’t so bad, but I guess there can be more blogs added to the list.
Seems an okay list, missing some of the bigger blogs. What criteria does Invesp use to add blogs to its list?
@Lisa I believe invesp uses technorati as one of the ranking factors. Not sure if that makes them any better
Thank you for featuring the invesp blog rank.
The project started as a side project for couple of our developers and grew to a much larger scale than we had initially anticipated. Perhaps how comprehensive the list of blogs is one of the bigger challenges we face. We try to collect anywhere from 50 to 100 blogs when we first release a category and then rely on the community to add more blogs to the list. That has been effective with some categories more than others. I have to admit the travel blogs have provided some of the most insightful feedback to the system.
ps- I did not put our website in the link because for some reason my comments get flagged as spam. if you would be kind to include the invesp url in the website field!
@lisa It is really difficult to compare the two lists. Technoarti recently updated their ranking system to display the top 100 blogs in specific categories across the blogosphere to match what blog rank is doing. However, technorati ranking relies solely on incoming links to a blog for its ranking. This is only one of the factors we use in ranking blogs. One of the factors we rely on is number of incoming links.
Also, something important to note is that technorati disabled access to their API as part of the release of the new ranking system. Makes me think they might consider our ranking as a real competition. Of course they have a lot more resources at their disposal compared to us.
@Khalid
Thank you for coming by…eventually.
I must say that I had contact with your fellow Invesp lady Ayat via Twitter already a year ago. She suggested me to e-mail you on the Hotel list and the Travel list,which I did via e-mail and comments on your blog, but this is the first time seeing you reacting…I know it is a hassle to maintain lists and I am glad your lists took away some manual and time consuming list making from my shoulders. Thanks for that!
Howevre there are still improvements possible!
@Lisa
I concur with Khalid on Technorati…their measuring algorithm has become even more wobbly nowadays. The attention span is now so small that the ranking fluctuates from day to day with a huge volatility.
I am very interesting in traveling,and this list is really helpful.I think i can find out better destinations and hotels by reading this.
Why punish blogs that don’t use feedburner? Seems
unfair. Also compete traffic estimates are way off…
Great list… top 150 general travel blogs list. I really like this useful post and going to bookmark this page for further review and learning latest ideas and useful information about traveling. I love travel and now we are going to plan Mid Wales, UK to spend our December holidays.
This is a great idea. I will try what you suggest and post your list on my blog.I like Asia Travel.Thanks for sharing.
Congratulations on your top spot in the Invesp List! 🙂