Also what is popularity, 1000 backlinks, or 20 000 page views a month. Back links are one time. So I can have a 10000 links in Feb of 1994, but none since and only has 500 page views now. Is that blog considered more popular than one who has 1000 recent links and 30 000 views a month , consistently for the last year or more.

A recent temporary change in algorithm for blogs ranking by Africa’s most authoritative blogs aggregator attracted a lot of debate and suggestions. After complaints by bloggers, Afrigator soon made a formal announcement via their blog: Blog ranki…

What do you value more, a lot of feedreaders or a high rank on Afrigator?

Just a note on the linking. Our reason behind this was that if you write good posts and your peers link to you, it is an indication of authority. If you get craploads of traffic of which most is bounced visits, it does not mean that you’re very authoritative and it means the system can easily be fooled into thinking you’re popular. We’re trying to avoid that by taking a number of things into account to get the best mix.

Ah, that makes it more specific. I would then suggest that the ranking should be qualified some how. For, there could be back links from blogs that are rated highly via some other method that are not registered on Afrigator.
Perhaps a more Qualified Afrigator Ranking, “Top 20 blogs in the Afrigator Universes” or something similar. This then gives some kind of context to the ranking system. Although it is infered, being more specific, will ease the hearts of those who are generally ranked higher on other systems but not so on Afrigator.

What do you think?

I think your both wrong and right in some areas. Most certainly a back links to a blog is a vote of confidence in the blog, but it certainly does not determine whether a blog is crappy or not. Chris your years of experience in this field should tell you as much.
In fact, one can buy links, if you have enough money. How does that then make your blog better than any other.
Anyway, what backlinks are counted. Only ones from Afrigator member, hardly a fair ranking of the popularity of the blog.
What’s crappy to one is pure pleasure to another. It’s the viewpoint of the reader.
Yes one can also buy traffic. This is why there is no right or wrong way. Afrigators algorithm and their ranking does not mean that this is the absolute scientific result of the top 20 blogs.

Manga, traffic is indeed a huge player when it comes to the popularity of a blog. But these can also be manipulated. I believe that Afrigator need to upgrade it’s a;algorithm, not only this time but on a regular basis as new factor present themselves and as they themselves, the Afrigator team. learn more.
The point is, as I said before, the Afrigator ranking is not the be all and end all of a blogs rank. To get an accurate idea, one needs to take into account many other different factors as well as other ranking systems.

AS an example many blogs have a higher Afrigator ranking than mine, but mine has a way higher Alexa ranking, or Compete or Quintcast. You see it’s all a matter of view point.

Lets just hope that the guys at Afrigator can get closer this time round. THen start working on it again for the nest iteration.

I don’t have any problem with the use of any algorithm to determine blog rankings. However, I still insist that no amount of Algorithm can to determine what the “Best” blogs are. From where I stand a blog’s quality is determined by content, interface design, etc., and not by abstract algorithms which serve a different purpose.

So it is not the place of Afrigator to weed out “rubbish blogs” from its rankings or to skew the results in such a way that the blogs it considers “rubbish” (based on content, written by bloggers out of SA/Africa?) will be excluded. If that were the case, then the rankings would serve absolutely no value.

Anyway, let’s agree to disagree on this one without being disagreable.

I’m done with the issue.

The point here is that traffic alone or links alone or page rank alone is not sufficient and therefore an algorithm is used to encompas all these factors in such a way to get a good mix between traffic, links, authoriry amongst other things. Taking all these factors into account presents us with a far better list of blogs.

I have been blogging for 10 years and have won blog awards on more than one occasion, I’m well experienced in this field..