Although there are plenty of tools for checking the popularity of your blog, for many of us Google provides much of our blog traffic.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger reports that Google’s currently updating their backlink and PageRank. What does this mean to you?

Backlinks, also known as incoming links, are the number of links from
other Web sites or blogs that point to your Web site (or blog.)
PageRank is Google’s rank from 0 – 10 of the value of incoming links
and is part of their algorithm for determining how your blog ranks.

To determine your backlinks type "link:www.yourdomain.com" into the
Google search box. (Do I really need to say "without the quotes?") As
you may know, the number and quality of incoming links effects how your
blog ranks at Google and other search engines.

(In case you’re interested, Business Blog Consulting has 3,260 incoming links and a PageRank of 7.)

Darren goes on to talk about one of my favorite page rank tools, Keyword Tracker.
With this tool you can find out how your blog ranks for specific terms,
such as "business blog" or "blog marketing". Darren says you have to
run the report each time you want it updated, but if you have access to
a cron you can have your server run the request for you.

A while back I wrote a Keyword Tracker tutorial that will walk you through the setup process.

A new conference is being held in Austin, TX, on November 2nd, called The Blogging Enterprise. A blurb from the site says…

"The Blogging Enterprise is a one-day conference that will explore blogging, podcasting and video podcasting and their potential benefits and value in building brands, educating prospects, making sales and cultivating customer loyalty. Attendees will depart with new ideas and a better sense for how to implement this new technology successfully."

They are looking for speakers for the event and had asked me to consider it. But, I declined saying I new at least a half dozen people per topic much better qualified than me, most of whom are contributors to this site. If you’re interested in speaking, contact Steve Farrar. They’re looking for sponsors too, btw.

While battling reliability and scaling issues Technorati is forging ahead with new services. David Sifry announced the launch of their Blog Finder service. The basic premise is to rank blogs by category or technically speaking, by tags. David says in his blog that new service answers the question, “How can you find authoritative blogs on a subject?” This is what Robert Scoble was asking for on Monday.

I took a quick look around at the new service this evening and here are my initial impressions.

The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category ‘PR’ instead of ‘Public Relations’. As such, Neville Hobson’s blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on ‘PR’ but is nowhere to be found on the list for ‘Public Relations’ blogs. Fellow Business Blog Consulting contributor BL Ochman is listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Public Relations’.

My blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Orlando’ even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.

There are other issues as well. In the ‘PR’ search, Neville’s blog is listed in three places, under three different URLs. (nevon.net/nevon/, nevon.typepad.com and nevon.typepad.com/nevon/) This is due to the fracturing of data within Technorati’s index. If you remember Neville discovered this when he was having problems with Technorati’s search tool.

In addition, Steve Rubel is not listed under ‘PR’ or ‘Public Relations’, but he is second for ‘Podcasting’ behind Dave Winer.

If you have a Technorati account and have claimed your blog, you can specify the tags you want associated with your blog. I looked at this option and it does allow you to specify up to 20 tags for your blog. One problem I noticed though was it didn’t always save my changes. I removed a few generic tags such as ‘Stuff’ (one of my categories) and replaced it with something else. A few minutes later I returned to the entry screen and a number of tags were repeated and some of my original tags were no longer there. Hopefully they’ll fix this.

Overall this should be a very talked about feature. The initial bugs I noticed should be able to be cleaned up. We’ll see how the rest of the blogosphere reacts in the coming days. And unfortunately, we’ll also see how soon the spammers begin to manipulate the results.

Update 9.2.05 I have posted some futher analysis of Blog Finder.

From the press release: "washingtonpost.com today announced that it has partnered with blog search company Technorati to offer its readers the opportunity to view comments and opinions about washingtonpost.com articles and editorials from around the blogosphere." Very cool. More on MarketingVox.

To feature a banner like this on your blog, click here.

If you’ve been reading my Intuitive Life Business Blog, you already know that it’s become a hotbed of discussion about the lawsuit that Traffic Power sent to Aaron Wall, and its implications about our responsibility as bloggers for comments left on our blog. That article is Aaron Wall sued over comments on his weblog. As it happens, I also just wrote about how adding comments on other people’s blogs should be a cornerstone of your own blogging strategy too: How do i get more traffic to my blog?

But lawyer Daniel Perry has the best testimonial I’ve seen yet about why commenting on other blogs is such a good strategy. In less than a week he went from adding comments on my blog to being quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ll let Daniel explain what happened…