Ya ya I know … another post about Technorati. Well if you don’t find stuff about the service of interest ya know where your J key is 
I find the Technorati service of interest precisely because of the service it purports to provide bloggers. Ideally it is a way for you to search blogs specifically for information and conversation on topics of interest to you. Secondary to that it also provides a ranking system so you can concentrate of reading the most popular blogs for your interest areas.
Lately though I’ve begun to wonder if it has become more of a playground for SEO’s, marketers and just general all round pain in the ass AdSense blogs. I’ve got nothing against the first two if the linkage is valid and to the point of a post they have; but when they use that linkage in order to spam the Technorati rankings they step over the line in my opinion.
Case in point; and one that is really pissing me off no end, is my post the other day about the A-List. Now this post got some fairly heavy traffic; for me anyway, and among one of the linkbacks in Technorati was to Search Engine Journal. That was fine and dandy – I even left a comment on the original post made on the subject there. Then as is my want over morning coffee I checked back on Technorati to see if there were any new links and any new comments I could make regarding any of my posts.
Much to my surprise I saw that I had jumped up in linked blogs – which at first was pretty cool – until I started checking the actual links; which you can check for yourself here, and discovered that the majority of the 14 new linkbacks all went back to Search Engine Journal or a scraped version of the Search Engine Journal blog called Search Engine Journal’s Journal using various URL’s . Even more curious was that when I check some of the actual linked pages on Technorati there was absolutely no mention of my article on the page – either in text or link.
Now I don’t imagine for one second that out of the millions of blogs tracked by Technorati that WinExtra is special enough to be the only one being used this way. Which in turn begs the question of just how widespread is this artificial inflating of linking?
To me these are dirty links which devalues my work and Technorati’s usability/reliability as a source of trusted blogs. I have no idea if Technorati has any mechanism in place to combat this type of stuff; if they don’t I think they should, but I sure wish I had some way to Mr. Clean my links.
Some might also consider this practice to fall in with what is commonly referred to as gaming Technorati. However to me this gaming is best typified by the 2,000 Blogs meme that was going around awhile back but in my opinion another perfect example of this is the Review My Blog trick being used by John Chow Dot Com. While he says Technorati has frozen his ranking he encourages others to keep on writing and reviewing his blog so that their rankings can be increased.
Sure all the more power to him but to me this is out and out gaming of Technorati and it brings absolutely nothing of value to the table for the blogosphere as a whole. Not to mention that stuff like this devalues once again the purpose of Technorati.
Other’s have written that Technorati needs to be doing something to improve their service; especially with Google Blog Search coming on strong. Well here’s an idea – give us a way to blacklist the sites that pollute the service with dirty links and then get tougher on anyone gaming the system. It doesn’t matter how many WTF features you add – if your base service isn’t reliable and trustworthy then you lose your authority.
I was wondering about those links myself. Just on a whim this morning I decided to follow the technorati link on your A List Ads article.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
First thought: “Why are there multiple links back to the same site but only one of them discusses the original article?”
Then I thought I might not understand the service (technorati) completely and it was just showing me all of the links back to your site.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Steven, sorry about your unpleasant experience with the links on your A-List post. I can assure you that we take fighting gaming and spamming very seriously. We have a multi-layered approach to identifying, flagging, blocking, and purging the likes of what you describe.
However, in this particular case, it turns out the multiple “blogs” were the result of a issue from over a year ago when many posts from certain blogs were pinging us with the permalink of the post, rather than the URL of the blog itself. As a result, many searchenginejournal.com posts became “blogs” and our system was confused.
I have corrected the mistaken blogs in our system and the corrections will work themselves through shortly.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention and I hope Technorati remains a useful service to you and others.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
[...] Steven Hodson – Misuse of Technorati and and the dirty links [...]
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Andy, fair criticism. We have and continue to work on systems to control abuse and misconfigurations. Processing millions of requests a day means some mistakes will get through. If we can fix issues identified by our users manually to address a specific problem while identifying patterns to add to our automated systems, I believe we are improving the service for everyone.
Thank you for your comment. We aim to be of service – it is a tough job.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
James:
out of curiousity what was your first reaction when you saw them?
The reason I ask is because I know you and know you are primarily a reader in contrast to a blogger.
Dorion
Thanks for dropping by and more importantly thank you for fixing the problem.
Technorati get so confused about so many different things, as I have written about recently there really is a need to change the way they handle links.
Technorati pick up new “blogs” on sites without any encouragement from a blog author, or for that matter readers who can also ping a blog, or blog post.
A manual patch of the blog in question is just covering up the flaws in the way the system currently works.
Why doesn’t Technorati manually patch the enhanced results achieved by blog networks, or those that use a shared blogroll widget?
Adjusting the results of a single site when millions of other blogs still benefit from the same flaws isn’t a “just” solution.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Andy;
I agree with you on the shared blogroll widgets. I have never liked them myself – I always thought of it as a cheap way to gain link points.
I wonder though if the adjustments that are supposed to made for here were applied network wide just how many sites would be affected.
thanks for dropping by.
Dorion;
No doubt trying to keep ahead of stuff like this is tough and I am glad if in some small way what I brought to you attention helps clean up the system for everyone.
After all I may just be a small blog in the blogosphere but it seems that blogs like mine are the prime targets for folks who use these tactics. Small enough to help them get the results they want and not big enough to draw attention to said practices.
So thanks for trying at least for one small blog