Techmeme usually sends thousands of unique users per month to Search Engine Journal, dependent upon our percentage of breaking news stories and coverage.
Like other news aggregation sites out there on the web, Techmeme has its own special way of selecting blogs and the coverage they receive.
Gabe Rivera, who I had the pleasure of meeting in San Jose last summer, covers the Techmeme (and Memeorandum Network; Techmeme, memeorandum, WeSmirch, and Ballbug) selection process on his blog, blog.memeorandum.com.
Here’s a breakdown;
Content : “Break news or write original analysis, and do so clearly and concisely, always careful to provide real value to new and existing readers. And use descriptive titles.”
Coverage Hierarchy : “enable discovery of your post. If necessary, though emails, links, trackbacks, IMs, etc..”
Basically what Gabe is pointing at here is the more blogs which cover and quote your story, the more importance it will receive on Techmeme. So, if you have breaking news on your blog, and dozens of other blogs cover your post, chances are that your blog will receive credit for the story based upon citations and times of posting.
So, even if TechCrunch covers the same story two hours later, you’ll still get recognition at Techmeme as being the source :)
Gabe also notes he’s doing his best to combat Memeorandum:
Early on I noticed my system occasionally missed good posts from blogs that link back to my sites. So recently I extended my system to take referrals into account. Now if your blog or news article sends a moderate level of traffic to one of my sites, it will be evaluated for inclusion. Linking certainly doesn’t guarantee you’ll appear, since all posts are run though the usual tests for newsworthiness. In fact, extra steps to avoid spam are now in effect since faked referrals and splogs are already commonplace. So in summary, sending memeorandum (or Techmeme or…) visitors is another way to “enable discovery of your post”.
