What follows is a basic primer for shares math in Blogshares. Some concepts will be greatly simplified, for additional background, read elsewhere in this blog for more information, starting with the earlier entries and moving forward.
Some months ago, the way that shares values were calculated changed, old caps on values were removed, and other tweaks to the math were added to keep things interesting. This has thrown much of the shares market for a loop, but as with any game change, if you understand the math involved, you can make a profit.
For the purposes of this article, it is assumed that you have one or more claimed blogs in Blogshares. If not, go to your favorite blogging site, and get with it! Now, on your claimed blog, you will have incoming links (folks that have links to your site on theirs), and outgoing links (links on your site to other folk's blogs). The value of your blog is the total of your incoming links, plus B$1,000 for the base value of your blog.
The fun part is the outgoing value, under the old math, this would simply be the total value of your blog, divided by the number of outgoing links, with a cap of B$25,000. The more outgoing links you had, the less the outgoing links were valued. With the new math, this is now quite the reverse.
Outgoing values now are variable, depending on the number of incoming links relative to the number of outgoing links. If your outgoing link totals are very similar to the incoming link totals, your outgoing value will be your blog's total value, divided by the number of outgoing links. So, say your blog had a total value of B$ 1,000,000, and you had 10 outgoing links, these would have an outgoing value of B$ 100,000 each. However, if you had, say, less than 5 outgoing links, these may only be worth about B$ 25,000 each or less, but if you had 30 outgoing links, they could have a value of around B$ 500,000 each.
There are various thresholds in the new math, and I haven't collected enough information to know where all the danger spots are, but for this article we'll stick with the basics.
The first point is to have 10 or more incoming links. This point shouldn't be hard, as many folks trade links all the time, sometimes just linking to another player's blog will turn up an incoming link back to you within a few days. The second point is slightly trickier...
Ideally, you want to have about 3 times the number of outgoing links as incoming. If you have 10 incoming links, you want to have 30 outgoing. If you have 20 incoming, you want 60 outgoing. If you have 75 incoming, you want to have 225 outgoing, etc. Again, there are thresholds in place, so you can go slightly above or below these values, but too far out of range will see your outgoing values crash.
For shares play, keeping your outgoing value high by maintaining a good link list is critical. Generally, you will want to link back to those that link to you, this will add value to their blogs, which will in turn potentially add value back to yours. For other links, those can go almost anywhere, as long as the sites are listed in Blogshares.