Links in Corporate Blog Memes

This is a short post on the number of incoming links in corporate blog memes and represents part six in a series on Fortune 500 blogs. The data is based on the blog memes I collected using Blogpulse.

The chart below shows the frequency of incoming links in corporate blog memes, starting at zero. By definition, at least one post in every meme had no incoming links as all memes end somewhere. Since only memes containing at least two tiers were collected, all tier one posts had to have at least one incoming link to be included in the study.

Almost 61% of posts had no incoming links and a further 28% contained one incoming link meaning 89% of posts had no more than one link. The maximum number of incoming links found for any post was 17.

The same sharp downward trend found in previous charts was also evident in the number of incoming links per post. The space restriction makes the data points for higher numbers of links difficult to see but they’re not zeros, the complete tables of data is available here.

One particular point that is relevant to make again is that not all tier one posts were collected so this data represents a subset of complete blog memes. If all tier posts were collected the sharp downward trend would be even more accentuated between zero and one incoming link per post.

The low number of posts with higher numbers of incoming links suggests memes were “thin” in that they don’t spread widely at each tier. This was true but previous posts in this series have shown both that the majority of posts were tier one and tier two posts and most memes contained only two posts: one tier one post and one tier two post. As a result, it is hard to generalize the findings in this way.

The data presented here is subject to all of the limitations I’ve mentioned in previous posts as well as the general limitations of my study. It is also specifically subject to the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the Blogpulse search index.

Posted on July 23, 2009