post

243

243: That’s my current Technorati authority, which was 313 just before lunch ( two hours ago). 3 months ago it was in the neighborhood of 600, then it went into a free-fall. I’m clearly not the only one, as indicated by forum threads like this:

The canned Technorati answer is that since authority is calculated based on links in the past 6 months, it’s quite possible that old values just naturally dropped off. Most complaints in those threads come from users who participated in some sort of scheme to artificially inflate their link counts: something sophisticated like the 2000 bloggers trick, or circle-link groups, or just mutually getting on blog-rolls ( I hear Technorati re-evaluated blogrolls).

I haven’t done any of the above. Ever. Which means I don’t have large groups of links which should drop overnight. Oh, and my inbound link list is still completely messed up, often showing my own blog posts as inbound links, under a subdomain of my own URL . Something I requested Technorati to fix months ago. If they don’t respond to forum questions, why would they bother fixing bugs? Symptoms of a dying company.

Why do I even care? Technorati Authority in itself is quite irrelevant – but I still use it as a “spam-filter”, when searching on Technorati. I have the default authority level set to ‘some’ and this eliminates the zillions of auto-generated spam blogs, which typically have 0 or 1-2 inbound links. That’s about the only benefit Technorati search still has, otherwise I would have long switched to Google Blog Search, which is faster, more reliable, and also searches comments.

If others have the same habit, within weeks I might not show up on their radar screen, when my Technorati authority reaches zero.smile_sad (I kinda wonder if it can go negative).

Please, Google, implement link-count filter!

Update: 15 minutes after posting it, it shows 325. Might as well just use a random number generator.

Comments

  1. Zoli,

    We’re seeing the same thing. I think there are multiple factors in play, including removal of splogs, viral link tags, and overall reduced linking to external blogs… use of Twitter and Facebook… etc.

    When I wrote this up in September, I was noting a drop from around the 120 level. Now I’m around 90.

    Why My Technorati Ranking Is Slip-Sliding Away
    http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/09/why-my-technorati-ranking-is-slip.html

  2. I’ve seen a similar drop-off in authority for months low (though more gradual in my case).

    Two points/thoughts on this:

    1. I question an algorithm whereby rankings *drop* despite all other things trending upward (traffic, RSS subscribers, total inbound links, etc.) If your blog is getting better, why should your ranking drop and other blogs rank higher simply because they’ve gotten more links *recently*? Doesn’t make sense.

    2. Not sure about you, but I’ve got minimal (as in almost non-existent) traffic from Technorati. I question if anyone is really using it to reach my site anyways, so not sure what value it really provides.

    My two cents. I’ve become less and less of a Technorati fan over the past couple of years.

  3. I get *some* traffic from T’Ratty, but not a whole lot. 89.4% of search-based hits come from Google (not Google Blog Search).

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