I Held Out
On January 29, 2006, I wrote a post to Technorati about a problem I was having. I documented communication since August of 2005. I’ll quote from it because the words I’m quoting are to this day still true.
The original issue has never been resolved. It involved the fact that Technorati wasn’t accurately tracking links to my account and that the count kept getting stuck and links kept getting missed.
At the time I wrote, isn’t 5 Months Patience Enough? Now it’s been 30 months and my blog is still wonky in the Technorati index.
Anyone who has followed the list of posts I’ve written about Technorati knows that I give a lot of space to a group that works hard with an overwhelming task. But what’s the point when the basic service — 180 day index of “blog reactions” — has in my case been, at the most, only 75 days. I sure would the other 105 days in my count.
On May 19, 2006, I recorded a comment to benchmark the problem.
Recently, I was told the problem would be fixed immediately.
It’s been more than immediately and still nothing.
Do you even pay any attention to Technorati anymore?
UPDATE: Here are some responses I got to this question on Twitter.
Does Anyone Take Technorati Seriously Anymore?
- I haven’t taken Technorati seriously for close to a year now. Sad, really. Was a great idea for bloggers. No more… ;(
- Personally speaking, no. I used to check it out regularly, but haven’t in months.
- I haven’t looked at Technorati in months.
- no the technorati rank seems to be more akin to a random number generator at the moment.
- I never took them seriously, but that’s just me.
- I haven’t visited Technorati in months, to be honest.
- I only use it to look at who links to me… that’s it.
- I had been using Technorati quite a bit. But somehow, 200+ links to me disappeared in the last two weeks. I don’t believe it.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
I gave up caring about Technorati back when I realized that many links were from attribution tags in templates. Rather than having great content many have inflated rankings blogs were linked for designing a popular template. I know there are ways to work almost any system, but it seemed futile to worry or spend effort looking at Technorati when the deck was stacked from the beginning.
To be honest, I haven’t for a while now. I wanted to give it another chance, but when my wordpress passwords were rejected by Technorati only when trying to claim my blog, I got a bit annoyed. I don’t have to be forced to mention Technorati for no good reason, just to prove them I am the owner.
It’s actually out with my frame of attention these days, Liz. I don’t find it particularly relevant to what I’m doing with my blog: I have a feedreader to tell me when my favourite blogs have new posts, I have stats to show me when someone’s linked to my blog, and I don’t need it to lead me to new and exciting blogs. I think they need to innovate quite drastically in order to develop a service which captures their market’s imagination. Currently, they’re not capturing mine.
I take all that data with a grain of salt these days. We too have been frustrated with Technorati. We have one blog that has not been pinged in 100 days! When we write them, we get no answers back. And when we checked the forums, many people were having the same issues. Not being pinged. Links not being counted. – I have a new client who is worked up about his Technorati rank, his Alexa rank, his quantcast data….it is my opinion, just write a good blog, link to others, get incoming links…..as long as I come up in Google searches on Page one, I am happy. If people are finding me organically and my phone rings with new business, I am happy. If my readership is steadily growing, I am happy. That’s my 2 cents!
I must admit I used to check on MZM’s rank every so often, but I’ve seen so many glitches with their reporting, I’ve started to wonder myself if it’s worth the trouble. I mean, what good is it, if it can’t keep current?
I’m with you and Amy and Alina – I think it’s time to move on…
Hi Alina!
You and me both. My post amazes me. 30 months of the same problem does seem excessive when I’ve done a lot to keep folks believing that the company is doing the best that they can.
Hi Amy!
Seems they’ve all but become irrelevant. Other sources, such as Social Rank, are far more consistent.
Gave it up a long time ago for the reasons listed in: http://internetducttape.com/2007/05/24/quitting-technorati/
since then I’ve had even more fun with the service like how it started indexing my comments instead of my blog posts?!
I’ve been in the top 50 most favorited for about a year now. Which works out to probably less than 50 hits.
I don’t think Technorati authority means anything in a new world of link sharing via twitter, delicious, stumbleupon, friendfeed, google reader, etc.
Hi Robert!
It’s sad really. I like the folks there. I feel left out in the cold.
Hi Liz,
I haven’t paid any attention to Technorati for a few months now. I used to check Technorati every couple of days, but I haven’t found obsessing over it to be beneficial at all.
There are many more important things to do than bother with Technorati and it’s issues.
I use it more to look for splogs than anything else.
Liz, I haven’t check my technorati for a month now. According to what I understand is that technorati is kind of blog search engine with some useful features. I used to check the blogs that link to mine because I created wordpress themes and I’m very curious to know who’s liking mine. This is the only feature I really from technorati. No service does like the technorati does.
I look every couple of days, but only to see if anyone is linking to me. I no longer go with their rankings, it’s all about those high traffic blogs and such. After the google slap I got technorati slapped as well. Plus Tech doesn’t always update.
Hi Lin!
I know. I go there about once every 7-10 days now. Not much to find when my link archives are always screwy.
Hi Jeremy!
Yeah, I find lots of splog links quickly there. 🙂
Hi Myo and homemom3!
I’ve found the best way to track my links is Google Alerts. Google Blogsearch and Technorati miss too many links that come to my blog. It makes it hard to say “thank you.”
After the Google “slap,” things at T’rati only got worse for me too. But the problem is seriously 2.5 years old.
#4
Hi Derrick,
Sorry Askimet seemed to love you there for a while. If only Technorati found us all so attractive. 🙂
I’m with you. I’m happy at the many ways people find me and my clients. 🙂
#1
Heather!
I know. . . . just design a blog template and get to the Technorati top 100. Or better yet, buy one at sitepoint, put your name on it, and get there without the extra work. 🙂
Hard to feel good about something skewed that way.
#8
Engtech,
I love your post! Thanks for bringing that link. I hope everyone here goes back to read it. 🙂
I’m doing a John Galt on Technorati I think.
Technorati used to be my place to check for those linking to me, but ever since I set up Google Alerts for my blog and my name etc, Technorati doesn’t even come close to staying current like Google Alerts does.
Hi Liz,
I’m sorry to hear that your inbound links aren’t all being captured. While we’ve made a lot of performance and stability fixes over the last year, spam handling and parser quality issues remain big challenges. The spam problem is enormous. We have striven to be inclusive but we find that the pings we receive are often over 90% spam. That is, we filter 90% at the outset. Of the remainder that we process, a substantial portion of that later reveals itself to be spam and must be scrubbed out of the index. Unfortunately, thwarting efforts to abuse or game our systems has detracted from our ability to advance other aspects of data quality. That said, new systems to fix the parsers and workflow of data are under development. We are also working on improving the system to remove or reduce the incentives to abuse it while still being of service to bloggers. I hope to be reading your blog in the future finding that we’re providing value to you and your blogging endeavors.
Have a great day!
best regards,
-Ian
Technorati
Hi Ian,
This post was about how archives have been wonky for 30 months and only go back maximum 75 days. . . . your answer is about tracking links.
I’m confused.
They are broken and always have been. I have NEVER understood why they don’t just parse RSS feeds to find our updates, but noo… they have to come in person and they are always getting confused..
Recently they had hundreds of blog reactions from my own site – that is, *my* pages listed as reactions to other pages.. I asked, they told me that one of my pages was “pinging” them.. however, NONE of my pages ping them and never have.
On the plus side, every time I have mentioned any indexing issue, they have fixed it quickly.. but why should they have so many issues? Has to be either a pile of incompetent programmers or a pile of junk equipment or both.. this kind of stuff just isn’t that hard! Lemmee guess: whole bunch of Windows machines running Visual Basic or Access? Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Hi Anthony,
Would you like answer 1, 2, or 3.
Add to your list the inability to get out from under. One sentence in the comment about is about my problem — which states it wrong and makes me wonder whether reading the blog post was too much.
The rest of the comment is about their problems. Is that how customer service works? Sounds very Web 0.2 🙂
T’rati is so DONE. I stopped using them or caring months ago. They so jumped the shark and they’ll never recover.
What’s Technorati ?
😉
Liz,
I’m really trying to be helpful to you and your readers. The link index data that’s online now goes back over a year, well beyond the 75 day timeframe you said you’re seeing. I emailed you privately to see if I could get to the bottom of the issues you’re seeing. There’s a lot of discussion from your commenters about spam and data quality; next time I comment here I’ll refrain from addressing issues from other commenters lest it cause further confusion.
-Ian
Hi Michael and Mike!
Yeah!
Ian,
You’re welcome to and I wish you would help the commenters on this blog. But I don’t agree that you were discussing their issues . . . you were discussing Technorati’s problems, not theirs.
Meanwhile, just because you believe that the link index goes back well beyond 75 days. Links to my archive show that ain’t so — at least not for my blog. I’ve never have anything but repeating pages past page 100. I did my homework. I’ve been doing it for a while now.
Another version of the same thing from May, 2006:
I recorded a comment to benchmark the problem.
Technorati is utterly useless Liz.
I have gotten in touch with someone in PERSON and still they have not solved the issues.
They are not a reliable source anymore.
Shama!
It appears that they don’t know that. Believe me, I’ve been in person and helped them many times in the past. I used to get folks to believe in them again when they broke. . . .
Sad but true, Technorati has been reliably unreliable for about two years. A great idea, to start with – and I think we all went way out there to give the benefit of the doubt & exercise patience – but it’s highly unlikely to recover from this sustained low. Too bad.
Liz what you are describing now might be just an interface problem, not an index problem but there is an index problem regardless (as you know)
An example for Ian
http://technorati.com/search/?from=https://www.successful-blog.com/1/dear-google-im-the-relationship-blogger/
I can see pingbacks on the post
I actually have the same problem
http://technorati.com/search/?from=http://andybeard.eu/2007/10/pagerank-update.html
But that seems to be a broken option on the advanced search as this search works
http://technorati.com/search/andybeard.eu%2F2007%2F10%2Fpagerank-update.html?language=n&authority=n
And so does this one
http://technorati.com/search/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.successful-blog.com%2F1%2Fdear-google-im-the-relationship-blogger%2F
So it is not so much that the data isn’t there, just that it is hard to access.
Hi RJ!
Yeah, I agree. We all so wanted a benchmark to know what was working and what wasn’t. It’s sad really.
Thanks Andy,
For taking the time to investigate this further. It’s always nice to understand this kind of a puzzle.
If it’s that hard to find the data, I still question whether it’s making it into the algorithm.
The irony that the investigation didn’t come from T’rati isn’t lost on me.
I’ve been trying to go back through my blog and replace the Technorati tags with local ones lately.
Your the first person that I read to even mention them in months. There was a time when a Technorati rank was exciting, I don’t think anyone cares now.
I’m with you on that, James,
I was just on a quest to document how many folks would realize they felt the same way and hadn’t yet said so. 🙂
i used to check technorati all the time, but it seems that my ranking has gone down, though google blog search sends me an email every time someone links… and it’s every day. AND my traffic has gone up. so i’m thinking wtf?
Here’s hoping! I’ve just claimed my blog which was a nightmare and while searching the net for “how tos” i have noticed a pattern. Any guesses? Yep, Technorati seem to be nearly useless.
Thanks for creating this insight on the subject.
Mike