Update, July 18: Almost as if as an answer to this post, but really a coincidence, Andrew updated the Ratified.org ranking algorithm. Before, Ratified.org ranked blogs based only on Technorati authority; now it ranks based on a secret formula consisting of the aforementioned authority, Google PageRank, and Feedburner feed subscriber counts. Now, Yuga is at #5, where he more or less is expected to be, and I’ve now dropped to #36, which is not bad.

Cool. I’m already at the front page of Andrew’s Ratified.org and currently at #23. I’ve also managed to overtake Yuga who’s now at #24. My terrific rise in the rankings (I’m now among the top 10,000 blogs at Technorati) is almost single-handedly due to my Lakbayan website. Marc was correct in saying that Lakbayan is one of the best Pinoy linkbaits this year. Other links came because I attended the Taste Asia Food Fest two weeks ago.

That said, I find it just a bit disturbing that I got this high on Ratified.org. While Marc (the other one) thinks that I deserve to be ratified, I feel as if I cheated my way up the ladder. While I did not participate in any viral linking schemes, my high rank due to Lakbayan is arguably no different from the high rank that blog theme designers like Bryan (#1), Riz (#4), Joni (#7), and Gail (#11), and plug-in and widget creators got.

I rank higher than Yuga on Ratified.org and Technorati, but this doesn’t mean that I have more authority. There’s no question that Yuga is a respected authority in the Philippine blogosphere (heck, he’s a paid endorser!), and he got his authority because he writes compelling content that appeals to a lot of bloggers. Me, I’m just riding on the coattails of Lakbayan’s unprecedented popularity and not because my blog is actually read by all of those who’ve linked to me.

Then again, I’ll admit that I’m enjoying the “popularity” I’m getting. And I did include a link back to my blog on the HTML code you get from taking the Lakbayan test. I definitely mentioned that people taking the HTML code to paste in their websites were free to mutilate it, and many did. But I expected that the vast majority of people were content to stick the HTML code as is so that I can enjoy the “link love,” and I was correct. (Some people even pasted the code without setting their blog entry form to the correct mode, leading to garbage entries.) I even lamented the fact that Technorati is incapable of counting links from Multiply blogs, with which I would’ve easily been in Ratified.org’s top ten.

What do you, dear readers, think? Notwithstanding Lakbayan’s appeal, does vaes9 itself deserve its rank?