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Technorati is a Joke
People put way too much stock in Technorati. In theory this is a great service - it ranks all the blogs on the web according to the amount of love (links) from other blogs they get. Unfortunately in its current state it is about as reliable as asking my drunk uncle Ted which blogs he thinks are the best on the web. Let me show you why.
Lets compare the Technorati ranking of Net Business Blog (which averages ~1500 uniques per day and ~1000 feed readers per day) with the ranking of my personal blog, MattCoddington.com (which averages ~100 uniques per day and ~50 feed readers per day):
How does my personal blog outrank this much higher traffic blog?
1) I have a sitewide text link on John Chow dot com - I exchanged blogroll links with John long before he started his blogging experiment. So when his blog got big I still had a link on his blog which really gave me some SE juice. But it honestly didn’t increase my Technorati ranking all that much. This is because Technorati doesn’t defaulty register each and every page on John’s site that included a linkback to my site (which was 100% of them).
2) Someone has been pinging the hell out of John’s blog recently - There is a simple Technorati trick that allows you to ping every URL that links to your site directly to Technorati, thus making it count in their database, thus adding a link to your ranking, thus increasing your overall position. So whoever went crazy and pinged every single page on John Chow’s blog not only increased their own ranking, but mine as well since I had a sitewide link on John’s blog.
A couple other people have benefited from this John Chow pingfest: Tyler Cruz, Career Ramblings, David Lithman, and Jon Waraas to name a few. Not to say some of these blogs wouldn’t be able to generate a decent ranking by themselves, but they certainly aren’t the top (traffic-wise) couple thousand blogs on the internet.
How Can Technorati Fix This?
I see two possible solutions:
1) One solution for this obvious exploit is for Technorati to count each and every linkback to every site period. I know they want to keep it exclusive to blogs, but if they can’t find a better way to filter out what is a blog and what isn’t (just the ping effect currently) then the system is completely pointless.
2) Count *all* links from blog to blog within the Technorati database.
In any case, they certainly need to update their system so that at the end of the day it counts *ALL* links, period. If they continue to only count some links then people will still be able to exploit it using these simple ping techniques.
Technorati in its current state is worthless and should not be taken seriously by anybody. Anyone who manages to get a sitewide link on a decent-sized blog can easily go from obscurity to the top 5k overnight. Not to mention if any popular blog finds out how to use this trick and decides to implement it. It could very easily be the push from a 2k ranked blog to a top 100 blog.
Popularity: 5% [?]
True. I randomly received 300 backlinks all coming from Chow’s blog a day ago - which bumped me up into the top 10,000.
Amen to that! I don’t pay much attention to technorati. I think the important things are replying to every comment (within reason) visiting your commentator’s sites, commenting on relevant sites and becoming an active participant, and staying active in MyBlogLog to check out new, relevant blogs that your contacts are watching. Forget technorati, if you do the above, the traffic will come, and that’s what matters the most.
I tend to think technorati is the most overrated thing on the ‘net, I don’t even waste my time worrying about it anymore.
It used to be a good traffic generator for newer blogs, but with all the tag spam lately it is pretty much worthless.
Matt, what do you think when you read one of Technorati’s slogans -There are 100,000,000 blogs, some of them must be good!?.
You think ‘WTF?!*’, don’t you?
* - Where’s the Fire, of course.
That must make my blog a joke, I seem to be missing out on the benefits of Technorati.
On a side note, anyone know why my name isn’t a clickable link on the Top Commenter’s?
I don’t really know Jack … unless someone came before you and posted on the name “Jack” but didn’t include a URL. I plan on resetting the top commenters soon so we’ll see if that fixes it.
I never realized how easy it was to manipulate the Technorati rankings. Unfortunately with this information, it seems that just like Alexa, it is being given far too much weight by many parties when you take into account how easily it is to manipulate it in your favour.
The value of a link is overrated these days.
Whether or not you have a ton of links is more a factor of whether or not you’ve been linked to by a “source for bloggers” (digg, delicious, lifehacker, etc).
***Matt***
This is partly true Matt. Technorati gives a general sense of how a blog is doing in terms of popularity, but someone who pursues link-exchanges will have an unjustified higher rating than another site.
Also, your example comparing your two blogs is a great sample showing the innacuracies of Technorati. Keep up the great posts.
I wish I was smart enough to write something cool here.
Matt, I think that in it’s current state links from JohnChow.com should not be taken seriously. Everything else seems to work (unless you ping flood them), but for some reason they think every link from his website is a blog. Now obviously Technorati has to fix this, and calling Technorati a “joke” might get them to listen, but other than John’s blog they’re doing things pretty good. I just hope this type of thing doesn’t spread like wildfire.
Ryan, this is just one example. If I were to get a blogroll exchange on ANY blog I could do this trick and drastically increase my total pingbacks. It isn’t just limited to Chow’s blog.
I understand that, but do you know of anyone else actively doing this?
I know that this is something Technorati has got to fix before spammers start doing this, but as far as I know Chow’s the only one exploiting it.
I know a few ;) but most of them are splogs with little to know sitewide links on big blogs anyway, so the effect isn’t as big as what I showed in this post.
Its another example of the best of a bad bunch really. There isn’t any decent way to measure blog status, really there are too many factors to properly rank a blog, like:
- visitors
- subscribers
- link backs
- age
actually thats all I can think of :-) But I’m sure there must be more! I suppose eventually technorati will find new ways of improving their system.
What I think is funny is the top 100 Favourites list, I’m sure that must be easy to game, you only need 100 or so people to favourite you and you get in there…
They need to stop counting sidebar links altogether as I wrote about recently.
This pinging your whole blog thing actually happens without user intervention, though on a lesser scale.
There are plenty of other ways Technorati is being gamed.
I’m sorry about your uncle Ted. I hope he overcomes his affliction.
Technorati is a joke. They need to fix this ASAP.
I’m just amazed at how much everything is based on Alexa and Technorati rankings. I think they are both heavily flawed. Until they fix this, people will always take advantage. And you’ll have top commentators on posts reaping the benefit from this (us included).
Then who to trust? What is the best measure?
The Technorati glitch is too easy to manipulate now - if they don’t resolve this quickly then their metrics will lose a lot of validity. And if you can’t trust their numbers then what good are they?
I unfortunately have to agree. I don’t understand why Technorati hasn’t tried to challenge FeedBurner, they have so much more potential. Their ranking system has really become such a joke that I’m also not sure why John Chow still cares about cracking the top 100
“Technorati is a Joke”
Thanks Matt for affirming what I’ve been saying all along. Technorati is Irrelevant.
There are many other problems also associated with technorati it actually wont show the current posts of any blogs.. My blog updated daily is shown as “Updatd 69 days ago” I shooted a complaint and there was no reply
I too agree technorati is a Joke (a bad one of course) but it is said that TLA looks for Technorati and Alexa for the Cost of Link
BTW technorati is really funny name for anybody from India - in most of the languages in India “rati” means Sex…lol
Well, it looks as if the Technorati problem (at least this one) has been solved. How’s this affected your rankings Matt? Actually, I can easily check myself ;-)
It may be a joke, but I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to increase my rank over the past few weeks because most review and advertising company’s base a lot of value of Technorati, and right now, because my rank is so low they are neglecting me!
Nobody’s mentioned technorati’s piss poor customer service. If you have a problem, they autoreply to you, then ignore you. Some people have been waitng close to a year on trouble tickets.
I can’t even ping one of my blogs and it suddenly stopped updating over a week ago. I give them one week, then I remove their code.
Its too bad a good thing (in theory) gets ruined by poor customer service
Personally, I think that Technorati is in a tough spot. By limiting itself to ranking by how many blogs link to each other instead of ranking more along the lines of Google it really loses out on exactly what you are talking about - basing ranks truly on traffic and subscribers.
I run a blog at http://food.red-icculus.com and I think you have some valid points, but you are a bit misguided. Links from other blogs are yet another metric (YAM?) on the net to judge popularity on the net. Singly, those metrics may be insufficient, but judged together, they make a great big picture of popularity.
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