The Power of Links

Thanks Haza for the link.

"As it happens, the bloggers already function as a kind of kitchen cabinet for Google's relevancy ranking algorithm. Google measures relevancy by determining how many other pages link to a given page -- the more people point to your "Remington Steele" tribute site, the more likely it is that Google will recommend it to someone searching for info on '80s detective shows or Pierce Brosnan or Henry Mancini theme songs. Those pointers are themselves ranked by Google: If a lot of highly linked-to pages link to your page, you'll rise even higher in the rankings.

You'd be hard-pressed to design a system that gave the blogging community a greater impact on Google's results. Because bloggers by definition link far more than your average Web page, and because they also tend to link to each other's sites (most blogs feature a now standard list of comrades in their margins), a page that attracts the attention of a few bloggers will quickly shoot up the Google rankings. Do a search on Larry Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" -- a hit with the blogging community -- and a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week. (Or at least it did the last time I checked; Google rankings are hardly set in stone.)

This is the Blogger Effect. It's what happens when the arbiters of relevance in the "attention economy" shift toward a bottom-up structure."

Read the article here.