Is the A-list of bloggers a closed list?
This is a question that has been bothering me for a while, and I’m blogging on YOUmoz about because it needs the greatest audience possible – something that my non-A status can’t provide. The A-list, as I define it, is that circle of experts and authorities that are most widely followed in any particular realm. In monetizing blogs, you have Darren Rowse. In small business marketing, there’s Jon Jantsch. In search (with which I’m most familiar) you have Cutts, SEOmoz, Wall, Daggle, Stuntdubl, and a handful more. They are the big-brand bloggers whose leading status self-perpetuates as a critical mass of fans promotes them to others entering the space – deservedly so for the most part, because they write useful, original content.
But you have to wonder: is that all that’s out there? I know, for example, that Dan Thies wrote an excellent article about proxy-spamming stealing rankings and traffic from Brad Fallon’s wedding favors site. Fallon brought in Thies, who figured out the problem and a solution. But if you were counting on hearing this news from SEOmoz, Wall, or others, you’d be deeply disappointed. I just searched SEObook.com for Dan Thies, for example, and there’s no coverage of his discovery. Particularly ironic, considering everyone’s favourite SEO book’s author’s contempt for Google. And I don’t think I heard about it through SEOmoz either, though I might be wrong.
What’s remarkable there is that even a brilliant, reasonably well-known expert like Thies has a hard time getting attention from the Big Six. And his article was well-researched–it was breaking news that no one else had released. It was remarkable that such significant spam could be happening, and even more so that it should happen in a non-porn/drugs/gambling industry, and it was everything else you’ll hear the Big Six themselves use to describe good SEO content. Granted, it did gain links and a generous amount of interest, as it deserved. But on the A-list? “Who wrote that? Oh, Dan Thies… yeah, smart guy, but whatever. He’s not one of my close buddies that I like to link to or write about.”
(Even if it turns out that somehow I’ve erred and that in fact the majors did all talk about Dan’s piece of information, that wouldn’t defeat my argument. It would just show that I should have put more time into researching examples.)
If you did find fault with my example and want another, you could see my post on whether SEO can be automated (it was written September 6th). Come along Search Engine Journal, Bruce Clay and company to rebut 360ecommerce and their silly claim that search marketing can be automated. Guess who got the buzz? And you’d think some mentions in the comments of a related, antecedent article of interest would at least elicit a mention, a link if you’re lucky…. But let’s not get hung up on the examples.
Now, I hear you coming already: the big guys regularly link to non-A-list people. That’s true, and I don’t dispute that. But do they link to anonymous Joe SEOs regularly / repeatedly? Not quite. Not that they’ve got an obligation to, either. It does seem at least partly hypocritical, however, to say that you can make it as one of the big boys just by producing quality content. Because to make it to the prime time, quality content isn’t enough. You need attention. Regularly. And lots of it. And it’s my humble opinion that the biggest players don’t really give their regular attention to smaller players.
The A-list is a closed circle where I’m concerned. What do you think? And is there a solution to joining the A-list that isn’t dependent on getting its members’ attention in the first place?
