Tailrank
Tailrank is a site that takes content mostly from news blogs and posts it in one place. As they say, “We track the hottest news in the blogosphere!” They take links from thousands of blogs and try to present the most up-to-date news on the web.
Technically speaking, it is a “memetracker.” That means that Tailrank looks for blogs that get lots of traffic and have lots of links. They look at links, relevance of the text, the blog’s ranking on different search engines, and their own ranking for past links to the blog.
Tailrank shows everything publicly. It is designed to help bring more people to your blog by listing it with other blogs of similar content. As of October 2006, they were linked to 150,000 blogs. If you have a blog that is getting traffic, it is probably already on Tailrank somewhere. You don’t even have to submit links to be there!
The stuff on Tailrank is real content. You don’t find a lot of ads for SEO blogs here. They permit any kind of blog, but unless your blog has some good content, it won’t rank high on their ranking system.
Most of the most popular stuff on Tailrank is news-oriented; either news stories or bloggers commenting on news stories. It’s all pretty interesting; you don’t see any sites advertising ringtones or weightloss programs. Theoretically, whatever’s popular on the web will be popular on Tailrank. And, it’s searchable so you can look for certain stories or tags.
On the day I checked, the most popular sites listed included political news about John McCain and Jon Edwards, new legislation concerning iPods, commentary on Steve Jobs’ ‘Thoughts on Music,’ the Iraq war, and crazy weather in the United States. Lots of the popular stories are not only news, but blogger news. In other words, when bloggers draw criticism or controversy.
Tailrank doesn’t mind if you make money on your blog, but obvious spam or link spamming is not permitted. Until recently, Tailrank didn’t worry much about what was posted, but due to some recent spam blog posts, they have become a little stricter.
Tailrank doesn’t seem like a site that you could use very effectively to draw traffic on your site. To get a high ranking on Tailrank, you have to have lots of links and traffic on your blog. Once listed and ranked high on Tailrank, you’ll draw more traffic. Since it looks for memes by itself, there’s not much bloggers can do to use Tailrank.
