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Technorati Rank – Blogroll The Charts And The Blogger's Guide To SEO

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Does anyone understand Technorati Rank? A few weeks back, I dropped from eight thousand and something (out of the one hundred millions plus Blogs that Technorati tracks) to twelve thousand and something (not a good thing). I noticed this morning that I was in the low ten thousands, so I asked a bunch of friends on twitter to head over to Technorati and "favorite" this Blog and/or the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast in hopes that it would enable me to crack the big top 10k. About an hour after that I cracked the top ten thousand (felt good to be home), then by later this afternoon, I was stuck at 10,018 and now – at least check – I’m at 9985… but for how long?

How does Technorati ranking work? How do I drop two thousand spots in a couple of hours… is it the people who link to me, is it the amount of comments, is it the amount of Blog postings, or is it all of the above? (or none of the above)? I’ve heard many people comment that "Technorati is broken." I actually love it for many reasons, but I’m stumped on how the ranking works and curious as to why I care so much about my Blog’s ranking?

In the spirit of my Blog posting, Your Blog And Podcast Are Not Enough – Start Adding Comments, I’ve decided to also clean up my Blogroll (which I call – Check Out The Blogs) – right over here on the left navigation. Slowly, over the course of the coming months, I’m going to remove the Blogs I don’t follow any more and add the one’s I love, but have not had the time to add. I’m also doing this in the hopes that others will update their own Blogroll (and, hopefully, add me if they are a serious fan). My guess is that this will impact everything from Technorati rankings to Google natural search engine results. So, while it won’t be on one specific day, I’m doing my own Blogroll version of Bum Rush The Charts in the hopes of connecting to more and more Blogs that I love (and getting some real and sincere reciprocated links in the process). This is not link bait and no, I’m not accepting Blog applications to be on my Blogroll (I know who’s missing and who needs to be there). Maybe if other Bloggers do their own Blogroll The Charts, some semblance of sanity will return… dare to dream.

I’m also very engaged by The Blogger’s Guide To SEO posted by SEO Book (great SEO Blog). Here’s their explanation on this goldmine of content:

"While we wrote a 300+ page book about SEO, only a dozen pages are needed to cover how to do SEO for a blog. Why? As search improves, Google and other search engines collect more data, which allows them to rank blogs based on how well people trust those blogs."

There is so much information available in The Blogger’s Guide To SEO, that I’m going to shut up now and encourage you to go and check it out here: SEO Book – The Blogger’s Guide To SEO.

6 comments

  1. in part, technorati ranks you based on links from other blogs. but there is a freshness time-limit on how they weight those links. so, one thing that might have happened: a while back, say a year ago, you got many links coming in (maybe because of a popular article etc), and your rank stayed high in part because of all those links.
    but a year (or whatever) later, you haven’t had such a big surge of links, and the weighting for those old links suddenly drops because they have passed their sell-by date.

  2. Thanks Hugh. That’s where my thinking was too, but why do I see some of these “a-lister” Bloggers who have not Blogged in forever, and are just running Blog postings that are random links from del.icio.us still able to maintain such high ranks with so little fresh content and links from others?

  3. Hi Mitch,
    The Technorati rank algorithm is actually very simple — your authority, and your rank, is based on the number of unique incoming links to your blog in the last six months.
    So, multiple links from the same URL don’t count and neither do the number of favorites (there’s a separate list of top 100 favorites).
    A-listers stay A-listers because people add them in their blogrolls by default and continue to link to their old posts. 😀
    I just dropped from low 10000s to low 20000s within a month, so I fully understand your situation. 😀

  4. Thanks Gaurav – I have a background in Search and your comment was how I assumed Technorati works as well. The recent anomoloies I have seen have made me question whether or not it is that cut and dry – like the major/minor dance my ranking did yesterday.

  6. Mitch, I am currently working on getting my blog up and running, I have a new experiment that I would love to share with you once I am closer. As far as the tech….. rating goes, is it really that important? I mean as far as I know this is measuring ALL blogs. I dont think you really want to compete with or care about what the Hustler or XXX blog is doing.
    Mitch, I think you have an amazing blog and podcast and the focus should remain on your unique content. I wouldn’t even care if you link baited, or monetized the podcast in any way. Like they say, your doing your potential customers, and listeners a disservise if you are not trying to get in their face. Mitch, your content is too rich and too valuable to stay in the “echo chamber” …keep drawing folks like myself in and the community will keep getting stronger.
    I guess I look at t this way….your aiming and hitting the target in the bulls eye why spray shots all over the place in hopes to up a rating that really doesn’t mean anything. Maybe, I’m just naive to the space, but I think your doing a great job…don’t come off as if these numbers are soooo important that you start to turn off your readership. Just my 2 cents. Thanks for doing what you do..as always
    Keith Burtis

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