Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2008, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In the mid-2000s, bloggers were obsessed with a single number: their Technorati Authority score. It sat in sidebars like a badge of honour, a shorthand for reach and relevance in an era when the blogosphere was still mapping itself.
Then, in 2008, a small Swedish company called Twingly did something quietly radical. It launched BlogRank — a metric that challenged the idea that influence should be measured in one language, against one global leaderboard.
The BlogRank experiment didn’t last. Twingly eventually moved on, pivoting toward B2B data infrastructure and news monitoring, where it operates today as a respected provider of blog and media data APIs. But the question it raised — how do you measure a blog’s authority in a way that actually reflects its context — never went away. If anything, it’s more relevant now than it was then.
What Twingly BlogRank was trying to solve
When Twingly introduced BlogRank, founder Anton Johansson made the case simply: Technorati was good at what it did, but it had no meaningful international focus. If you were running Sweden’s most-read blog, you might rank somewhere around 2,600 in Technorati’s global index — an arbitrary number that obscured real influence. BlogRank was designed to fix that by making rankings language-relative. The top Swedish blog earned a BlogRank of 10. So did the top English blog. Authority was measured within a linguistic ecosystem, not against it.
The ranking itself drew on inbound links and user engagement signals, similar in spirit to how Google’s PageRank worked — but scoped specifically to the blogosphere. Twingly’s spam-free index gave it a cleaner data foundation than most contemporaries, since filtering low-quality content from the crawl meant the underlying signals were more trustworthy.
It was a more honest way to think about influence. A food blogger writing in Hungarian for a Hungarian audience wasn’t competing against TechCrunch. She was competing within her own context, and BlogRank acknowledged that.
Why the metric died — and what replaced it
BlogRank didn’t survive into the 2010s as a public-facing product. The reasons were structural. As social platforms scaled, attention shifted from blog-specific metrics to follower counts, engagement rates, and platform analytics. Technorati itself eventually abandoned its blog authority index in 2014. The idea of a single, universal score for a blog’s importance gave way to a fragmented landscape where every platform — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube — had its own native signals.
In some ways, this made the underlying problem worse. A blogger with a deeply engaged German-language readership and 40,000 monthly visitors has genuine influence, but no single modern metric reflects that cleanly. Domain Rating tools like Ahrefs or Moz measure backlink authority, not audience trust. Social metrics measure platform-specific engagement, not long-term editorial credibility. The holistic, language-aware measure Twingly was reaching for still doesn’t exist in any widely adopted form.
Twingly itself moved in a different direction. Today the company monitors over 3 million active blogs globally — adding more than 3,000 new ones daily, according to its own figures — and sells that data to media intelligence firms, PR platforms, and publishers via API. The public-facing search and ranking product is gone, but the infrastructure that powered it scaled into something more durable.
The lesson for bloggers thinking about metrics today
The Twingly BlogRank story is a useful lens for thinking about how bloggers measure themselves in 2025. The instinct to find a number — something clean, comparative, shareable — hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that the numbers available are more numerous and less meaningful in isolation.
Domain Authority scores are manipulable and vary by tool. Social follower counts don’t reflect readers. Page views without context say nothing about depth of engagement or reader loyalty. The blogger who obsesses over any single metric is making the same mistake Technorati’s users made: treating a proxy as the thing itself.
The bloggers who have built durable audiences in the current environment tend to focus on signals that reflect genuine relationship: email subscriber open rates, direct traffic share, reader responses, community retention. These are harder to game and harder to compare, but they’re closer to what Twingly was actually trying to measure.
What a healthy approach to blog authority looks like now
The practical takeaway isn’t to abandon metrics, but to triangulate them. A useful picture of a blog’s authority in 2026 probably draws on at least three distinct data types: search visibility (organic traffic trends, keyword rankings), audience loyalty (return visitor rate, email list health), and external recognition (editorial mentions, backlink quality from relevant sources).
None of those is a single number. None of them can be gamed sustainably without the underlying quality that makes them meaningful. That’s essentially what Twingly’s spam-free index was protecting against — the idea that a clean signal is worth more than a high one.
The BlogRank experiment didn’t change the industry. But the instinct behind it — to build trust into measurement rather than bolt it on afterward — was the right one. Bloggers and publishers who internalise that instinct tend to make better decisions about content, audience, and longevity than those who optimise for whatever number happens to be visible this quarter.
Metrics are always a map, never the territory. Twingly knew that in 2008. It’s worth remembering now.
