Technorati Authority in Free-fall
Blogging July 30th, 2007
Two weeks after I moved this blog from Blogware to Wordpress (I’ll write about the migration soon) my Technorati authority is in a free-fall. It dropped about a hundred, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a week or so it bottomed at … zero(?).
My domain name remained the same, but the permalink structure is different, so I have 301 redirects set up (thanks, PressHarbor Support!), which is the method Technorati recommends. However, I’m starting to believe several bloggers who noted that Technorati does not follow 301 redirects are right… so first my authority will sink to close to nothing, than it may slowly recover. 
Update (8/7): I need to rely on hearsay from blogs, since Techno Ratty won’t bother responding on their user forum…
Tags: technorati authority, technorati, 301 redirect, blog migration, blogging
Zoli Erdos
Yup, it is pretty bad.
I ended up giving up on them completely. My old url is still at around 1100 authority while the new one is only 300 authority.
I also had some weirdness with technorati ratings, it halved overnight about 6 months ago and is only slowly crawling back up. I don’t think it was anything to do with newish authority thing, as it happened before that.
I’ve almost stopped looking. Pity cos I was a big fan.
Thomas, have you made any changes to your blog setup when it happened?
Zoli
Not that I can think would have impacted it. Same url, same theme, same enterprisey meanderings.
Come to think of it, it was about the same time I started using microsoft livewriter, but I can’t see how this could have had any impact.
Thomas
I had a similar experience when I changed the domain of one of the blogs I co-author.
Though the 301 was setup correctly for all pages, Technorati never figured it out and we saw our ranking impacted as a result.
The good news is that the Technorati ranking doesn’t matter all that much as it doesn’t really drive much traffic or visibility anyways (from what I can tell).
Just to add: Technorati does recognize 301s in a way. When I used them, they showed my content at both the old and the new address. This was less than desirable. They didn’t, however, transfer the authority.
Technorati’s relevance to anything is close to zero, anyway.
My authority has gone down about 20 points in 24 hours and the rank number up a couple of thousand. But there did not seem to be a dramatic change at the time of the handover from BlogHarbor to PressHarbor, so I am not convinced it’s the 301s.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much, I didn’t know people use Technorati anymore? They’ve received so much funding and the site still offers the same jumble of “features”.
Des, the dropping started about a week after the migration – since I kept the same domain, and the same T’rati account, I suppose that’s when their system noticed it. I dropped a 100 points in two days, and now it’s hanging there.. but I think it will drop further.
Oh, well…
Dave Winer wrote today about the same topic:
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http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/08/01/whyIsTechnoratiSoVolatile.html
We don’t really know how Technorati works, it’s a secret algorithm, and it seems a buggy one at that. Yet the many treat it as authoritative. Maybe someone can explain why rank can seem so volatile?
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So maybe your change of platform is just coincidence, the problem is Technorati’s and not yours.
Thanks for pointing it out, John… it inspired a new post