ECOSYSTEM REVISIONS
N. Z. Bear made an interesting change to his Ecosystem while I was away that has likely been blogged repeatedly by now by others:
Previously, the scan routines counted all links to a weblog when determining status in the Ecosystem. Starting today, only the total number of unique links will be counted towards a weblog’s ranking.
What this means is that if a weblog links to the same post on your site twelve times, it still only counts as one link for the Ecosystem rankings.
To be clear: all the links are still being collected, and you can still see them all in your details page. There are now two link-counts displayed: “inbound links”, which is the total number of links you have received, and “inbound unique”, which is the unique count.
This was brought on by a handful of bloggers who were creating ridiculous numbers of links to a particular blog in order to win a contest, as a component of one of the multiplying “blogging coalition wars,” or other silly reasons.
This is probably the best solution to the problem you’ve noted; it’ll also help end some of the blog wars silliness.
The mild downside is that if a blogger refers to another blogger in multiple posts but, being too lazy to actually find the permalink but merely mentions the site, the hit isn’t counted. Ditto if one were to hat tip a blog that one has on one’s permaroll. Since the permaroll link is already being counted, no other links to the blog would count (although the permalinks would.)
