Voting on Indiblogger

For companies, it's ROI. Only way they can judge ROI is based on likes, followers, etc. We as bloggers may know that those with such numbers may not be quality bloggers, but for them its marketing. That's a different issue altogether. 

Voting in Indiblogger has become nothing more than back scratching. Which was exactly why it was once suggested for anonymous voting. When people wouldn't know who voted for who, they wouldn't bother. Even when Indiblogger has the best intention for voting, it was the bloggers themselves who ruined the essence and importance of voting. 

Completely agree. I work on the other side as well (I'm a social media/digital marketing person, started the blog a few months ago) but in our company we look at the photography and content and then take a call rather than only work with blogs that have the highest followers, and that leads to us being associated with quality than numbers. It actually worked for us :) Agreed about the back-scratching. Also, Facebook is kinda dead now, unless you spend there's hardly any engagement unless you're a huge brand. 

I have had this concern on many occasions and felt frustrated at times too at the haphazard voting pattern and system. On one occasion, I had the good fortune of getting votes for a post that was deleted and had no content! Yes there is absolutely no co relation with votes and quality of content and I can say this for sure from the votes on my blog posts!!!

This is all about having a wide network of followers/friends/back-scratchers. The main idea behind indivine (supposedly) was to let members share their blogposts, to give them more exposure. This noble idea seems to have been overwhelmed by the ill effects of backscratching that came in as a side effect of this prominently give-and-take way of gaining exposure. This explains the reason for some mediocre and poor posts getting votes in 70's and 80's and 100's while some of the well deserving ones staying somewhere down not to be found by most indivine voters. This is not to say that all the top voted posts are bad, but a lot of them are.

Usually what happens while indivine voting is when guy A votes for guy B's blogpost, (either a genuine vote or just to get a vote back), guy B now has an undeclared obligation to vote back for guy A's blogpost, and in most cases, whether they like it or not, guy B normally upvotes guy A's indivine post, because of that obligation. So, the number of people you vote for in IndiVine is almost directly (and positively) proportional to the number of votes you will get for your indivine posts. And this includes even blogposts that clearly state that "THIS IS A DELETED POST. PLEASE DO NOT VOTE", as tested by Ranjith some time back, and still people blindly voted for this post.

Absolutely...you hit the nail on the head...more of thanksgiving than genuiness!

I guess I can be a good nail gun. 

Couldn't have said it better myself. I first saw this in a fashion contest years ago (not on Indiblogger but on some website) where it was all about votes. The winner, needless to say did not have any fashion sense but had 400+ votes while the rest who had actually worked hard on putting an outfit together didn't. Having said that, I do visit people's blogs and leave comments/vote. If you check out my blog, you'd see I work hard to put out quality content. Is it also to do with SEO, because I haven't done a lot on that front apart from using the Yoast plugin.

I don't think this (voting on IndiVine) has anything to do with the SEO of your blog, rather it is dependent on your SEQ (Social Engineering Quotient).

I have the EXACT same question at times.

The best of my posts have all got 2 and 3 votes and some of my own not so great have got slightly more. I never understood this, be it the machine, or the human mind.

I shall check your blog out. I don't get it either, plus I don't have many friends who are bloggers and/or are on this so in terms of that too it's tough to get voted. Brands these days seem to only look at social media followers (can be bought) and ratings which I'm not sure how they work. As a person who's worked on both sides (I work with bloggers too as part of my full-time job) I feel like content and quality needs to be more in focus than the apparent number of votes/followers.

Srikanth, Many of us here are busy scanning the forum, posting our blogpost in Indivine and checking out new contests, happyhours. When I have more time then I do check out my network posts and the one that has a catchy title gets a visit. And if I love the content, I promote and head on to subscribe if I feel the content is interesting. So naturally when I get a mail of a new post, i visit and pass my comment when time permits. Also many of us are connected in social networks too and hence connect there too. Just initiate the first contact and you get people visiting, commenting, liking your post either here or in your blog. This is as far as my thought goes.

Nandinim Katie, thank you for your feedback. It makes a little more sense to me now.