Not that I notice these things, but in the past week my Technorati 'authority' (number of other sites linking here in the last 90 days) has dropped like a stone, and my ranking seems to vary by several hundred thousand depending on which way the wind is blowing at the time. Maybe they're all getting a bit overloaded. It looks like links from the sidebars of other blogs (like the ones down the right hand side here) aren't being counted any more.
Technorati are also doing a 'state of the blogosphere' to find out who blogs, why, and how long for. Click the link to take part. Quite a lot of questions, not quite sure I have anything informed to say about blogging and the US election, but there you go - an ignorant opinion counts for as much in the survey as a well-informed one.
David, I've noticed something very similar, very ikely for much the same reason. The frequency of Technorati daily pinging seems to be going down and becoming very intermittent, sometimes 2 weekly. If the system is slowing down and pinging less frequently, it's gathering less information about any individual blog. It may just be coking up, perhaps coping with numbers of new blogs?
ReplyDeletePerhaps your answer is in this extract from an e-mail which I received from Technorati yesterday (Friday):
ReplyDelete2) Why Your Technorati Authority May Have Changed, and What You Can Do About It
Changes in Technorati Authority numbers - there are several reasons these numbers have decreased recently:
As our intent is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis, we stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations.
Due to the vast number of blogging platforms and custom installations out there (and some bloggers who felt we were using too much of their data), we now rely more heavily on RSS and Atom feeds than in the past. Bloggers can control how much of their content they wish to syndicate via feeds. Many blogs only provide partial feeds, we are not always able to get link data from them. Thus, links from these blogs may no longer contribute to your authority.
Finally, to make sure we always know about your updates, please make sure you are pinging us. You can ping us manually from our Ping Page, or learn about configuring your system to ping us automatically on our Help Page. Many blogging services and platforms have a preconfigured option for pinging Technorati and other services.
If you find links to your blog that don't appear on Technorati, you may want to check that the other blog:
* is claimed on Technorati
* has a full-content feed
* is pinging us with updates.
Thanks Peter, that makes sense. It does seem to be getting more and more erratic though. Hopefully this will help.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first joined Technorati I found it quite useful, but it has, as you say, become more and more erratic. If I'm blogging on a topic, i sometimes enter key words in Technorati to see what other people are saying about it, but I find Google blog search is much more relaible for that. Technorati keep changing their user interface and moving stuff around so it is far more difficult to find stuff. I used to be able to go to my home page on Technorati, see all my blogs, ping them if necessary, see who had linked to my blog posts, and see the top ten search keywords and the top ten post key words. That's how I learnt about Twitter, and discovered who Paris Hilton and Steven Furtick were.
ReplyDeleteBut those have all been scattered and are no longer conveniently visible in one place. I suspect that the reason for that is that Techorati hope that you will go looking for them as in a labyrinth, and so will be exposed to more advertisements and so they will make more money. That might work for a week, but after that most people will give up and stop visiting the site.
The home page was all over Technology Business Entertainment Lifestyle :Politics Sports Gaming Celebrity. One of the reasons I never visited Digg was that most of my interests didn't fit into any of those categories, and when Technorati went down that route I lost interest.
After writing this I went to have a look at their home page (for the first time in about six months) and they've put it back a little towards what it used to be, but still not enough.
And I just did a test: I searched for "hippocracy", and notne of my posts on that topic show up in Technorati, even though they have explicit Technorati tags. When I click on the tag in the post itself it takes me to the relevant tag page on Technorati, which tells me that "there are no posts related to this tag".
So Technorati is pretty useless.
Hmmm, I think I'll write a blog rant about this!
Yeah, I've found that Technorati seems to have unclaimed the blogs that I had listed to my account. It hasn't been working right for quite a while - maybe about this time last year I had checked it was keeping up to date with my blog entries, and it was three months behind, despite the automatic pinging enabled... Occasionally I'll look at it, but not for any useful information!
ReplyDelete