Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2008, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In the mid-2000s, bloggers cared about a single number: their Technorati Authority score. In an era when the blogosphere was still mapping itself, it sat in the sidebars as a badge of honor, shorthand for accessibility and relevance.
Then, in 2008, a small Swedish company called Twingly did something quietly radical. He launched BlogRank – a metric that challenges the idea of measuring influence in one language, against one global leaderboard.
The BlogRank experience didn’t last long. Finally, moving into B2B data infrastructure and news monitoring, today it operates as a respected provider of blog and media data APIs. But the question he raised—how to measure a blog’s authority in a way that actually reflects its context—never went away. If anything, it’s more relevant now than ever.
What Twingly BlogRank was trying to solve
When Twingly introduced BlogRank, founder Anton Johansson put it simply: Technorati was good at what it did, but lacked a meaningful international focus. If you run Sweden’s most read blog, you can rank around 2,600 in Technorati’s global index – an arbitrary number that hides real impact. BlogRank is designed to fix this by adapting rankings to language. The best Swedish blog earned 10 BlogRank. So did the best English blog. Authority was measured within the linguistic ecosystem, not against it.
The ranking itself was based on inbound links and user engagement signals, similar to how Google’s PageRank works, but applied specifically to the blogosphere. Twingly’s spam-free index gave it a cleaner database than most of its contemporaries, as filtering out low-quality content from crawling meant the underlying signals were more reliable.
It was a more honest way to think about impact. A food blogger writing in Hungarian for a Hungarian audience was not competing with TechCrunch. It was competing in its context, and BlogRank recognized it.
Why the metric died – and what replaced it
BlogRank did not survive as a public-facing product in the 2010s. The reasons were structural. As social platforms have expanded, the focus has shifted from blog-specific metrics to follower counts, engagement rates, and platform analytics. Technorati itself eventually abandoned the blog authority index In 2014. The idea of a single, universal account of a blog’s importance has given way to a fragmented landscape in which each platform—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube—has its own native signals.
In a way, this made the underlying problem worse. A blogger with a German-language readership and 40,000 monthly visitors has real influence, but no modern metric clearly reflects this. Domain Ranking tools like Ahrefs or Moz measure backlink authority, not audience trust. Social metrics measure platform-specific engagement, not long-term editorial trust. The single, language-aware measure achieved by Twingly is not yet available in a widely accepted form.
Twingly himself moved in a different direction. Today the company controls 3 million active blogs globally — adding more than 3,000 new ones daily, according to its own figures — and selling that data via API to media intelligence firms, PR platforms and publishers. The public-facing search and ranking product is gone, but the infrastructure that powers it has evolved into something more sustainable.
A lesson for bloggers thinking about metrics today
The Twingly BlogRank story is a useful lens through which to think about how bloggers measure up in 2025. The instinct to find a number—something clean, comparable, shareable—hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the numbers available are more meaningful and less meaningful in isolation.
Domain Authority scores can be manipulated and vary by tool. The number of social followers does not reflect readers. Page views without context say nothing about the depth of engagement or reader loyalty. A blogger who focuses on any metric is making the same mistake that Technorati’s users make: treating a proxy as something.
In the current environment, bloggers who have built a sustainable audience focus on signals that reflect true engagement: email subscriber open rates, direct traffic share, reader responses, community retention. These are harder to play and harder to compare, but they are closer to what Twingly is actually trying to measure.
Now that seems like a healthy approach to blogging authority
The practical result is not to abandon dimensions, but to triangulate them. A useful picture a The authority of the blog in 2026 probably uses at least three different types of data: search visibility (organic traffic trends, keyword rankings), audience loyalty (visitor return rate, email list health), and external recognition (editor mentions, backlink quality from relevant sources).
None of these are odd numbers. None of them are consistently playable without an underlying quality that makes them meaningful. That’s what Twingly’s spam-free index protects – a clean signal is worth more than a high signal.
The BlogRank experiment didn’t change the industry. But the instinct behind it—to build confidence in measuring instead of shutting it down later—was right. Bloggers and publishers who embrace this instinct tend to make better decisions about content, audience, and longevity than those who optimize for any number that appears this quarter.
Metrics are never a territory, always a map. Twingly knew this in 2008. Now it is worth remembering.
