Tag - technorati

Either that or someone is gaming the system.

I just took this screenshot of Technorati’s popular blogs page. Somehow this blog I’ve never heard of has rocketed to the top.

And not just to the top, but to more than 5 times the number of links of the erswhile reigning heavyweight champion, Engadget.

The blog is a Japanese site, Cururu, and Technorati says that 187,670 blogs link there.

One of two three things is correct:

1. Either Technorati’s ratings or methodology has been so lousy that it somehow didn’t noticed an amazingly popular blog for months and months and months as it rose to almost 200,000 inbound links, or …
2. Someone is really, really, really gaming the system but good, or …
3. Technorati’s algorithm has just gone completely farking mad

Come to think of it, I can’t really say which I think is more likely. That might be a sad commentary on Technorati’s technical prowess – or my cynical nature.

You decide.

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Update:

Cururu appears to be some kind of social bookmarking site … at least as far as I can tell from this very Chinglish-y translation. The site is copyrighted by a company called NHN Japan, which seems un-bloggish. Seems to be a company that builds web communities, actually.

Perhaps (double, triple perhaps) they submitted their non-blog site as a blog. Ditto the perhaps’s but it may really have approximately 50 million inbound links.

Further elucidation, anyone?

It’s really very nice to have your Technorati ranking jump 2000 spots in a day. But there’s something odd about it too. I think Technorati is weeding their index of blogs this week, and some interesting things are popping up.

Yesterday between noon and 9:00 PM:

1. bizhack jumped from 14,800 to 12,330
2. twopointouch jumped from 16,500 to about 12,500
3. Chip’s Quips jumped from 35,000 to 28,712
4. Orbit Now! jumped from 31,000 to 25,523

In my case, the number of reported inbound links and the number of blogs reported to be linked in has not changed, although I know some new blogs have linked to bizhack in the last week. I’m asking Ian Delaney, who runs twopointouch, if the same is true for him.

(Update: it’s not – Technorat is indexing his blog just fine right now)

However, what we might have here is a major effort by Technorati to clean its index of splogs, which might account for a less-than-satisfactory job of spidering existing blogs and updating them in their index … they have failed to take note of my last 15-20 posts, in spite of my pinging them.

If the numbers that I’m seeing and that Ian are seeing are correct, it’s possible seems likely that between 2000-4000 blogs were tossed out of the index – splogs, flogs, and who knows what else.

Interesting.

We need more data before we can make any really firm conclusions, though. Anyone else have similar experiences?

(Update: Please continue to post your experience below!)

As I’ve been vocal about on this blog, Technorati rankings are odd. And yet, somehow, I’m moving up:

Technorati hasn’t spidered my site in 6-7 days. Hasn’t noticed my last 15-20 posts. Hasn’t updated the number of links or blogs linking to bizhack even though I know more links have been inbound.

And yet … the ranking is about 3,000 higher than a week ago. If that’s not just an illusion, the top 10,000 is not too far away.

I won’t hold my breath.

Update: see Jason Calacanis’ comment below. He was misquoted or quoted out of context, and does not believe that non-top-ranked bloggers suck. At least not automatically. (Check his comment!)

Quick question: are you in the Technorati Top 100? If not, I hate to break the news, but you suck. If it makes you feel any better, I suck too.

Why?

Well, according to Jason Calacanis’ recent keynote at Blog Business Summit, if you don’t rank high on Technorati, you suck. Simple.

”Blogging is the biggest meritocracy in the world. It’s not broken. You don’t rank? It’s because you suck. … How well you do is up to you.”

However, there is a simple way to not suck:

He said all you have to do is look at the top stories on TechMeme, say something intelligent about the story, link to the other five top bloggers talking about it, and do that for 30 days straight, then you’ll be an A-list blogger.

Do most bloggers suck?
Obviously, most bloggers are not in the Technorati 100. Some us can’t even get Technorati to index our blogs regularly (see the last updated “4 days ago” nonsense).

Do we suck?

No! Some of us talk about things that are not mainstream. Some of us just haven’t gotten the break that pushes us out of the millions and into the thousands. And most of us just don’t want to do something as silly as blogging reflexively about the top three stories on Techmeme, day after day after day.

That said, I have to be careful here. I haven’t heard the keynote myself, and am just going on what other bloggers are publishing about it.

One more caveat: it sounds like he’s saying the way to be popular is to …

1. write well
2. write often
3. write on topics other people care about
4. and comment intelligently on other people’s blogs

Fundamentally, I have no disagreement with that at all. That’s all true – as far as it goes. I don’t think doing that guarantees that you’ll hit the Technorati Top 100, but it’s all good advice and IS going to get you higher ranking, more traffic.

What I disagree with is saying that bloggers who don’t rate high suck.

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Update 10:24 PM:
This post just hit the home page of Techmeme. Also available here.

With pride and joy and humility: under 15,000.

Thanks to everyone who has linked to bizhack – the last 5 who linked and tracked back are in the sidebar under the Text Link Ads non-text link image. 😉

Err … don’t let the “whoosh” title of this post deceive you. It’s been a long, hard, slow process. But very, very fun and rewarding.

Remember Geocities and Tripod? Remember how huge they were in the late 90’s?

I saw a blah.tripod.com address on the back of a beat-up pickup truck on the way home today – a cheap web hosting account for a small business, of course. Brought me back a decade or so, when Geocities and Tripod were the MySpace and YouTube of the day.

The funny thing is, when you go to their pages right now, they’re basically selling hosting. Only Tripod has a mini, after-thought, bottom-of-the-page listing of member sites.

Just imagine what these properties could have done if they would have had the foresight to be a Digg, a Newsvine, even a Bloglines or Technorati. If there’s anything those companies have taught us, it’s that there’s gold in the long tail.

Tripod and Geocities traffic shows just a slight downward trend over the past half a year, but that’s misleading. When the rising tide that should lift all boats is not lifting yours, you probably have a leaky hull.

How the mighty have fallen.