Is Technorati Even Relevant Anymore?
November 22, 2007
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I’ll admit that I used to follow my Technorati ranking closely, making sure that it was constantly heading toward that #1 spot.Not that it was ever going to get to #1, but you get the idea. My goal was initially to crack 100,000. Then 50,000 and 25,000 before I finally broke the top 10,000. Not bad for a personal blog, I figured.
After getting below 100,000 at the start of the summer, I figured that it would take me another three months to break 50K, and three more after that for 25K. So, Labour Day and New Year’s. Turns out I hit ~49,000 within about 2 weeks. I wasn’t really doing anything differently, but the number kept getting better and better, until it stalled somewhere around 46,000.
Then Technorati started doing something weird, and my rank started to fall. 60,000. 80,000. 101,000. In the span of about three days! I had no idea what was going on with the free fall, either, because, again, I wasn’t doing anything differently. It was about this time that I figured Technorati didn’t matter anymore if they were so arbitrary with their calculation of a site’s score. (Actually, the likely explanation is below, so read on…)
And today, on the one year anniversary of my personal blog, its rank sits at 395,824. Before I updated it this morning, it was about 377,000. Your guess is as good as mine. I don’t even know what the Technorati rank is for BloggingNotes. I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter. I’d rather base the success of this blog by the quality of the comments and feedback that I get. Believe me, it’s MUCH more valuable to me than a score from a site that people have been trying to game for years, just so that they can claim to be in the top 1,000 or so sites.
Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests wrote about how Technorati Dumps on Small Minded Bloggers after finding out recently that Technorati is going to dump posts that are more than six months old. So anything that I wrote between January and May of this year is no longer being indexed by Technorati and therefore could contribute to my score plunging.
Tony also speculates that with tagging finally being included by default in WordPress, including Technorati tags just seems like less and less of a necessary thing. Can’t say that I disagree, either.
Thanks for the good times, Technorati. But I’m not going to worry about you anymore.
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November 22nd, 2007 at 8:05 am
I’m disappointed with Technorati. My rank used to be ~30,000 and now its over 200,000!! My authority went from 80 down to like 20 and its hurtful!
I thought it was pretty cool being 30,000 in rank and now that I’m close to 10x what I used to be makes me want to abandon Technorati and its ways.
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:46 am
Yep. I don’t even consider Technorati worth worrying about anymore. I have no idea what my Technorati rank is for BN, and I don’t want to, simply because it doesn’t matter.
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:02 am
I have to agree that even though my own rank continues to go up and now in top 10k but it is less and less common for me to check the stats and until reading this post I probably didn’t check it in 3 or even more weeks.
I still think its relevant and don’t disregard it as I do see some free traffic from it but I agree that its relevancy seems to be dropping to blogosphere …
Alex
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:37 pm
The only stats that I check regularly are Reinvigorate and Analytics. Great article
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Technorati’s ranking is based on the number of unique sites that link to your blog (or pages within) in the last 180 days. If you had taken part in a viral linking campaign over six months ago that had been very popular at the time, then you may be noticing several dozen sites are no longer part of your authority or rank values.
The key is to either consistently write material that people will want to link to, or take part in a viral link train every four to five months.
That said, it doesn’t seem that the Technorati ranking means anything outside of Technorati itself. If they would have marketed this number a little better, bloggers might actually care. Unfortunately, they’ve stimmied their own popularity by stagnating
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:41 pm
@Alex: if they were to do something to explain why it should be considered relevant, I might reconsider.
Thanks for your comment.
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:41 pm
@BB: Thanks very much.
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:44 pm
@Jason: Which seems to confirm what I wondered about - they’ve effectively said that anything that I wrote in the past doesn’t count once it reaches a certain age. Thank you.
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:59 pm
It’s not the content that is deemed irrelevant, but just the links to them.
Either way, Technorati has been plagued with lots of problems over the last few months and thousands of popular bloggers have effectively said the same thing that you have here. I still check my ratings every so often (usually when I check my site’s front page), but it’s not something I’ll invest much time in improving.
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I use Technorati as a measure, but I do not agonze over it. I rank where I rank. I blog to fullfill a purpose. I will continue to blog, regardless of the ranks Google and Technorati care to dispense, but it is always interesting to read about.
Nick
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:29 pm
@Jason: Thanks for clarifying that it’s links, not content that determines rank.
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:31 pm
@Nick: Agreed about the goal being serving a purpose rather than a score. It’s why I’d keep doing this if I didn’t make money doing it (and I currently make nothing) - I do it because I really enjoy it. And I learn from it.