Dipping into the Blogpond

For those new to blogging, you may not have heard about a site called Technorati. Basically, Technorati is a blog monitoring source that keeps track of all the blogs that have registered on the site. Registering is relatively easy and free, and if you’re new to blogging, and serious about it, it really is a must as it helps others to find your blog.

Technorati also keeps track of links between blogs, and rates blogs according to a few different factors (from what I understand);

• the number of total links to your blog
• the number of individual blogs linking to your blog and
• how many people favourite your blog

Now if you’re a preblogger like me, chances are you won’t really give a damn about your Technorati ranking. But some of the “probloggers” and the wannabe probloggers do use it as a measure of their success.

Similarly many of the “pay for review” services factor in Technorati ranking when determining what price you should be able to charge for a review – one such site is ReviewMe.

But there’s something really weird happening at Technorati at the moment. I don’t know if it’s a temporary glitch or a permanent flaw, and it seems like John Chow’s blog is one of the main offenders (or perhaps it’s that he has so many outgoing links that it is really obvious). It seems like a link from his site is good for hundreds. Many bloggers are reporting astronomical increases in their rankings overnight.

Examples

Mitchell Harper – My Technorati Ranking Dropped From 120,343 to 3,960 Overnight

Tyler Cruz “As a result from the most recent reviews (And partly due to John Chow) I’ve jumped from 8,746 to 1,675 on Technorati!”

John Chow even acknowledges it ” However, because Technorati thinks over 500 of my blog posts are actually blogs, all the Top Commentators suddenly picked up hundreds of blog links overnight”. And “After all, who wouldn’t want to see their blog go from 50,000 to 2,000 overnight?”

And, of course there’s the fact that Technorati doesn’t even recognise that johnchow.com is a blog, yet still count the links from it (and in multiples too). John has written about how he got banned from Technorati.

Elaine Vigneault also points out that Technorati give themselves a rank of 1

So in conclusion, take Technorati rankings with a grain of salt, particularly if you are relying on this rank for advertising. It often seems to duplicate links from both the site and the post, and chances are the more “johnchow.com” links a person has, the less likely it will be that their rank displays the true state of affairs.

Update: I just noticed Matt Coddington at Net Business Blog (a great read) has written something similar about this too.