Technorati makes changes to blog ranking
Technorati has fixed a bug which will impact the ranking of the top 100 blogs. This means it’s likely to impact the ranking of your blog if you have one.
According to Technorati
Over the holiday break we found and fixed a bug that inflated authority counts for certain blogs. The blogs affected were those on domains that also have linked-to sub-domains. The links to the sub-domains were erroneously counting toward the blog authority of the blog on the parent domain. Since Technorati Authority is a calculation of how much attention is being paid to a blog and the posts beneath it, we do not include sub-domains. Sub-domains are treated as separate entitities and often are references to tools, utilities, features, and other non-blog resources.
Examples:
http://chinese.engadget.com
http://desktops.engadget.com
http://hdtv.engadget.com
http://storage.engadget.com
Well, we fixed the bug yesterday. The impact of this change is mostly limited to the Top 100 and the overwhelming majority of the blogosphere is unaffected. Thanks for bearing with us while the Top 100 experiences some turbulence.
We’re always thinking about how to improve and develop new meaningful metrics for the blogosphere and we welcome your feedback on these issues.
I’ve never had faith in Technorati. I’ve certainly never paid any attention to its ranking. That’s not to say that the top 100 don’t deserve to be there. They probably do.
Take Segala’s blog for example (trust me, I don’t keep an eye on figures, I don’t even know how many RSS subscribers we have). Our entire Web site, including this blog, is based on WordPress. When a blogger references me, or a post that I’ve managed to slapped together, they tend to link to Segala.com, my profile page, or this blog. Technorati sees these as three separate ‘blogs’ and as such, doesn’t rank ‘the blog’ properly.
I don’t really care much for rating a blog based on inbound links alone anyway. Different types of blogs attract different types of people. For example, a blog which attracts a large non-blogging audience, will not rank as highly as a blog which attracts an early adopter type audience, of which many blog and link back.
Shouldn’t Technorati be intelligent enough to recognise everything after segala.com/ as one blog? I’m not entirely sure they’ve fixed a bug as many blog networks will have entirely different blogs on subdomains. One of the main benefits of a subdomain is to create separate sites.
Read what TechCrunch has to say.
Thanks to Chris Brogan for the link via Twitter.
4 Responses to “Technorati makes changes to blog ranking”
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Not just the top 100 Paul, I was in the top 10000 at the start of the summer. Now 280000+. C’est la Vie.
On another note. A french blogger (Gonzague Dambricourt) has published a top 60 European blogs. First english blog is at no.12. Surprises me that! Would like to see where he gets his figures from. Also I have never heard of 80% plus of those blogs.
@Don, I think only analytics type tools can measure this type of stuff. If I look at the stats of say, MyBlogLog when comparing blogs that I author, they paint an entirely different picture to Technorati.
Regarding the French blog rank, weren’t many of the top ones, er, French? I’ve never heard of many of them either.
How do we rank? Inbound links alone? No. Number of RSS subscribers? No.
What if there was a European award which encouraged each blog to include a badge, encouraging readers to vote for them. So, let the public vote. You could even segment when all votes are counted to get category winners – reads don’t have to choose a category. I can’t think of any other way.
what counts at the end of the day is that you and I are even bigger networking sluts than we were last year
Meeting so many interesting people, have to say I’m loving it!
@don actually, my goal is to encourage others to get more involved in networking/connecting. I don’t think it technically possible for me to network any more than I do already – not without giving up the day jobs anyway