As their FAQ states, SiteNeighbors.com is a "non-hierarchical alternative for finding interesting blogs."
That's a fancy way of saying, they're trying to make connections that wouldn't be made in a normal fashion. And for a new blog, this may drive some traffic your way.
What they do is simple, though I'm sure the math involved on the back is complex. By placing their badge code on your site, they can see referrer traffic from the search engines. They compare that referrer traffic with other blogs referrer traffic and they make a connection. The blogs who get visitors through the same paths as you (who live on the same street) are your neighbors.
What makes SiteNeighbors.com different?
They don't rank blogs based on number of links, traffic or influence of the sites that link to them, all the typical SEO stuff. They match blogs based on "the similarity of the blogs visitors." Huh?
- "A key distinction of our approach is that every blog has a neighborhood and no neighborhood is better than any other neighborhood. This enables visitors to the neighborhoods to find other similar blogs that they might enjoy, even if those blogs are not very popular (based on link counting).
Our hope is that siteneighbors can become a valuable, and fun, resource for big and small blogs. Well established bloggers can use it to discover new blogs with similar content. New bloggers can use it to begin to build their audience."
I buy the logic. So, I signed up for an account and attempted to put it on several personal blogs.
For starters, I was happy to see I could block adult content from showing up as a neighbor. And you can also limit the mapping to just blogs, but that's it. Setting it up was simple. Unfortunately, two of my personal blogs are Wordpress.com blogs, which reject the javascript that SiteNeighbors.com uses to track incoming traffic. The third blog I set up is The JottBlog Experiment. You can see their sidebar panel there. Theoretically, the "neighbors" will change as they analyze inbound traffic and learn more about who comes to the site and how they get there. It should be interesting to see what they come up with.
I'll report back on how it's working. Time will tell whether it's beneficial in the long run. Look it over and give me your thoughts.
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