Without any doubt, Technorati is one of the top blog search sites on the web, and I enjoy using it, but there are things about it that confuse me.
Chief amongst those might be some odd behavior I see at the Technorati Top 100 Blogs. I’m trying to get a grasp on how the Technorati Top 100 works.
Except that I’m seeing sites listed that:
– Aren’t Blogs
– Aren’t all in the Top 100
What am I missing?
According to the heading above the rankings, the items in the top 100 are:
The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months.
Though a number of these are some of my favorite sites on the Web, they aren’t all blogs.
Not blogs:
The other point of confusion is that the ranks in the top 100 don’t match the Technorati ranks.
A deed page from the wonderful Creative Commons is listed as the number 4 blog in the Technorati top 100 Blogs, yet it’s showing a rank of 9th. Of course, there are a lot of blogs linking to this license, but it doesn’t belong on this list. And, what happened to the other five?
I haven’t used fileden, but I expect that it has a lot of links not for its content, but rather because it is hosting content. It’s at number 37 in Technorati’s top 100, but showing a rank of 60th in Technorati overall. 23 sites are missing at this point.
MyBlogLog kicked up a storm of popularity over the past year, and it has a blog of its own, but it isn’t the blog that’s ranking here. It’s at 46 in the top 100 blogs, yet 69th in the overall Technorati rankings.
I suspect that Fortune has a blog or two, but this link goes to the front page of the Magazine’s site. At 73 in the Technorati top 100, it’s actually past the 100 mark as the 105th ranked site. 32 sites are missing at this point.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been to the Arcsin pages before, and it’s showing the last update time of 371 days. It’s not being linked to because it’s a blog. At 74 in the Technorati top 100 and just below Fortune, its actual rank in Technorati is 109th. There are 4 missing here between Fortune and Arcsin.
I’m happy to see WordPress listed in the top 100 of anything, but it’s blogging software and not a blog. The WordPress blog is also in the top 100, but this one scores a 99th ranking as a top blog? Its Technorati rank is 137.
OK, these differences in Top Blog ranks and Technorati overall ranks have me wondering if some sites aren’t counted because they aren’t blogs (even though the ones I’m looking at aren’t blogs, too). Yet, I see a blog (Consumerist) ranked as 94th in Technorati that isn’t in the Technorati Top 100:
I don’t know if someone like Technorati’s David Sifry could explain this to me, but I don’t quite get it.
There is a Technorati assigned patent which appears to cover some of how Technorati works – Ecosystem method of aggregation and search and related techniques. But, it doesn’t provide any insight into the Top 100 Blogs listed.
If your blog is at http :// w ww. yoursite. com/ blog then technorati will only count the links to that exact url. However if you say your blog is at http :// w ww. yoursite. com/ then they count all links to that domain in your rankings.
This leads to large sites with a tiny blog getting inflated link counts and higher rankings.
It has been like this for almost ever, no idea why…
No clue here either, Barry.
It’s not my intent to attack Technorati; just to voice my questions. I really do like Technorati. I just don’t understand what’s going on here.
Is it possible that (1) these sites are pinging Technorati anyway? and (2) they are telling Technorati that they are blogs by signing up for an account and getting the Technorati bots to crawl them and mistake their entire site for a blog because there is a blog page, and as mad4 says, mistaking all links back to your site as links back to your blog?
If what mad4 says it true, that is a pretty major ranking flaw.
Yes, that’s a bug, we’ll fix it asap. What happens is that some of these sites that aren’t blogs ping us (or have someone ping us for them) and we track them as if they were blogs until we notice it.
Should be fixed tomorrow. Sorry about that!
Dave
Thanks, everyone,
And thanks, David. Appreciate your taking the time to stop by, and letting me know that it wasn’t me. 🙂
This is really an important issue however recently I noticed some other problem which I think is worse than this. Right now, there are several spam blogs in the Technorati top 100 by number of fans. I would like to give examples right here but if I would do that, your spam blocking software would block my comment. Go have a look for yourself.
Hi Osman,
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I think that Technorati does have some problems that it needs to work out.
The oddest thing that I see in the top 100 at Technorati is the listing of one blog which shows a “last update” of 244 days ago, though I know for certain that blog has been updated often during the last 244 days.