Technorati Authority?!?! May 8, 2007
Posted by showmescifi in blogging, technorati.trackback
Technorati has recently changed the way they calculate blog links and position. It’s something they call ‘Technorati Authority’.
Personally i think they should just be honest and call it Link Farming.
Technorati used to count how many blogs link to another and how many links in total (including multiples from the same blog). Now in their infinite blogging wisdom they’ve decided to only count total number of blogs for a six month period.
It’s an infantile and amateur approach to measuring authority.
Simply counting links as opposed to counting the authority of those links and volume doesn’t prove anything. If ShowMeSciFi is the linked in the Top Blogs listing on WordPress (which it has been numerous times) that should have more ‘authority’ than if it is linked just once in the Top Blogs listing – it should also have more ‘authority’ than if it gets linked on a link farm.
What would make more sense is something along the lines of how Google’s Page Rank works. Using links alone is what killed search relevancy for all other search engines. I’m not sure why Technorati which has such a strong and solid understanding of the blogging world would degrade itself in this way.
Technorati ‘Authority’ does not reward true authority it awards popularity which is something that can be manipulated.
I hope that Technorati is just doing this as an experiment on a path toward a true ‘authority’ metric that accurately reflects both the popularity, the relevance and the actual ‘Authority’ of a blog.
Show Me SciFi 
[…] recent months Technorati has changed its site and become increasingly […]