The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

This week's Tuesday Think Tank came as the result of a request from Julie, who had some questions about Technorati and why her ranking has been changing recently. If you have something you want to have covered in a future Tuesday Think Tank, we always are willing to take suggestions; all you need to do is send an email to either myself or to Snoskred, and we will tackle your topic on a future Tuesday. :)

There really isn't a lot to explain technically when it comes to Technorati. The biggest thing is basically an explanation of how it all works.

Technorati is most often considered the way to gauge a blog's popularity. It works by counting both the number of blogs that it finds with links to your blog, and also the actual number of pages that link to your blog.

There are three different numbers that come as a result of Technorati's counting - Authority, Rank, and Reactions.

Authority and Rank are intertwined, one based on the other. Authority is simply the total number of blogs that have linked to your site, or to a page on your blog. In other words, no matter how many links a particular site may have to you, it will only count as one authority point. Rank is derived from authority and is simply where your blog's authority ranks among all blogs they have listed.

When you start a blog, it starts with an authority of 0 and a rank of somewhere around 8 million. As blogs start to link to you, the numbers do improve; however, to get into the top 100 blogs by Authority, you'll have to have close to 4,000 different blogs linking to you. To get into the top 100,000 (which would have gotten you a nice graph in the past, but recent changes have seen the dropping of that graph), you would need an authority of around 60.

The most important thing to know is that authority and rank are not permanent numbers; of course you do want them to improve over time, but after a while, specifically six months, they may begin to go down. The simple reason for this is that links listed on Technorati "expire" after that amount of time. While I'm not an expert in Technorati, the main reason would be that some of the links might be in posts, or they might be temporary links which go away (for example recent comments lists on dofollow blogs).

Reactions are simply all the links that go back to your blog. This includes links in blogs' links lists, links within posts, and links that come from other methods of linking, such as from the dofollow blogs.

If you want to see the daily "performance" of your blog's reaction, you can check out an image like this -

- which shows you the links over the last X days. The address to use is the following -
http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q={URL}&days={# OF DAYS}&width=460&height=200&type=url
putting in your blog's url (minus the http://) and the number of days in the appropriate slots.

Of course, none of this works without Technorati finding the links on blogs.

How do they find links to my blog?

Technorati finds links like any other search engine would - through the use of spiders. It used to be that these spiders were fully-functional, seeing almost all the links that were on a page - including blogrolls, if you have them on your blog.

However, at one point in time in the last few months, they changed spiders to ones that are more in line with regular search engine spiders which cannot see JavaScript elements on a page. That means that if you're part of a BlogRolling blogroll (for example, the Blogger Chicks blogroll), links back to you on other blogs that are part of the network will not count towards your authority. If you're a part of a big blogroll and have experienced a drop off in your authority recently, that means that the six-month window has passed.

Another way that Technorati can find links to other blogs is by reading RSS feeds. If you ping them with a service such as Ping-o-Matic, and include your feed's address, Technorati will look at that, along with your blog, to find links you've put in posts.

A word of advice

Something that I've seen ever since joining up with Bumpzee are these "link trains" which are meant to increase both your PageRank and your Technorati Authority. You'll notice that I don't participate in them; at first it was because I was lazy, but then it was because I didn't see the value in linking to sites that I don't read (or in a lot of cases, never heard of), all in the name of possibly increasing my rankings (and supposedly my traffic).

The other part of the equation for that is that any gains that I'd see would be short-lived (for example, anyone who had participated in the exchange would not have their link to me counted on Technorati). Additionally, have updated their webmaster guidelines that these schemes are not good practice for you to follow as they feel that these types of links are not "proper" links.

Further Reading
In the companion post to this, Snoskred discusses the issues she's having and sends out an SOS.

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

Over to You
Do you have any more questions about Technorati? (Other than the obvious one of why in the world their servers are so blasted slow, or don't work half the time.) Feel free to leave a comment.

If you've liked this post, feel free to Stumble it using the links below. :)