Now We’re Getting Somewhere: the PubSub Link Tool
In a June 2, 2005 entry on his blog Micropersuasion, the estimable Steve Rubel noted that PubSub had some “cool new link measurement tools…” This elicited a sigh from me, given my past experiences with that site. And also some procrastination as far as checking the tools out were concerned. But to my surprise, PubSub’s stuff actually verged on the useful.
If you go to the Site Stats page you can get a summary of inbound links, outbound links and entries for a given site/blog, after you type an URL into the search box. Of course, Micropersuasion produces appropriately nuclear-reactor-control-room-like graphs. Thus encouraged, I checked out CoFactors. Now, folks, be nice - we’re a month into this thing. So I wasn’t expecting much. And at first glance I was happy with the picture.
But on second glance, what the hey? Since May 2, we’ve had a steady output of 2-4 postings a day. Nothing shows up until May 18, however, despite the fact that I pointed PubSub to our site some time prior to that. Also, a strange gap since Memorial Day weekend. Since May 26th, we’ve put up 6 posts. Nowhere to be found in our chart. Odd. And annoying. I’d guess it has to do with PubSub only indexing us every so often…but then why does Micropersuasion scan differently? Unless they are making exceptions for the bloggeratti.
I plugged in a slightly less populist site, Zeldman to see what came up. This is a great blog, especially within the usability community. Weirdly, all his inlinks pop up, but no outlinks. That can’t be right.
If this worked consistently, it would be a superb tool. So we have two requests for PubSub:
1. Feature the feature more prominently. It’s still too hard to find if you arrive at the homepage and want to check your in- and outbound links. Yes, you might try Linkranks, and then click on the Daily Link Counts Pages link, and then click on the tiny little Link Stats link in the upper right submenu. But why? It’s a great feature that deserves better navigation.
2. Make it work consistently for whatever sites get typed in…or make it more transparent so the results are understandable. There is a little disclosure language at the bottom of the linkcounts charts, but it’s not immediately clear to me how what it says bears on the results I’ve gotten…
JF
June 4th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
Thanks for taking the time to review our tools here at PubSub. I am sorry that the tools have not been able to deliver a complete picture of your site.
I did some digging through our logs and databases and I can explain what is happening. Basically, we are timing out when we try to read your feed. As a result, we treat it as an error and don’t count your blog entries or the links.
Please note that I am not saying that there is a general issue with your site. It is in our reading of your feed.
Due to the number of sites that we try to read in a day, we have a timeout built into our “Readers”. The main purpose is to prevent us from getting “hung up” on sites that no longer exist. Obviously, we need to take some corrective action and design a solution that will allow us not to drop sites such as yours.
In regards to your specific requests:
1. As one of the engineers working on LinkCounts, I will definitely push the suggestion!
2. This one is a bit trickier. We need to balance the amount of text vs. data on the pages. I will look at getting more FAQ type of information on the site in order to help explain some of these issues. Would that meet your needs ?
BTW, you are correct that the current disclaimer has no bearing on the issues that we are having with your site.
Please know that we are constantly working on these tools. We always encourage and welcome user feedback, good and bad. We are also greatly interested in any ideas for making these tools more useful for you. You can reach me at linkcounts@pubsub.com.
Mark Wagner
PubSub Concepts, Inc.