Technorati Losing It’s Grip
1:33 pm July 3rd, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
It seems like every time I check Technorati the site is getting worse and worse. As a portal or a way for a user to track a few different blog it work well enough, but where it once excelled and has been getting steadily worse is closely tracking a specific blog.
I use it as a tool to track the progress and popularity of this blog and while it once seemed to work really well, it it gotten worse at recognizing all the incoming links to a post. This means your rank suffers which can affect readership and even advertising. This is aside from the point, but Technorati’s site is buggy and poorly designed.
I have noticed that an increasing number of sites do not appear as “reactions” on Technorati when they link to a site. When this used to happen you could manually ping a page and Technorati would record those links as blog reactions, you can still do this, but it does not work all the time- if Technorati did not get it when the post was originally made chances are they won’t ever get it.
Personally I track my blog stats with Feedburner and Google Analytics so I wouldn’t care about Technorati if other people didn’t judge the value of a blog by its rank. Currently this blog has an “authority” of 188, a rank of about 25,000, and 269 blog reactions. From what I have informally noticed I think the authority/reactions numbers should be at least 33% higher as Technorati misses a lot of links. On the other hand my Google Blogsearch vanity search (for posts with my name in it) never seems to miss post…
I don’t know if people are not pinging Technorati any more or if they are and Technorati is just not recording them. Also, probably due to massive gaming by a few bad apples, Technorati’s manual ping is very selective about what it sees as a blog reaction and is generally not worth the trouble.
What is there to do about all this? I wouldn’t worry about it. Google Blogsearch has ended up being a much better tool for tracking topics and blogs and while it does not have the same focus on ranking or individual blogs it is a better way to find what you want. Additionally using Blogsearch (or even Google Advanced Search) you can easily find recent posts, which I generally what I want from a blog.
