How a “flaw” results in a high Technorati authority

I’ve real­ized that my site got a rank­ing of about 60,000 posi­tion in the Tech­no­rati lad­der. Pretty unusual, con­sid­er­ing that Tevine is pretty new. Then, I found out that Tech­no­rati was count­ing links from the only plu­gin that I placed a lit­tle adver­tise­ment on (i.e. Social Dropdown).

Unlike Alex King, which left pure flow­ing links in his pop­u­lar­ity con­test plu­gin, the plu­gin I made was spe­cially crafted to nofol­low all links, except for 1 link on the main page. It works pretty well, search engines like Yahoo and Google did not count the links I don’t want them to… sort of (there were a few sites, which didn’t update the plu­gin fre­quently to make use of the new SEO). How­ever, Tech­no­rati went ahead, and prac­ti­cally counted the links I didn’t want them to count, such as in the post of a blog.

This is odd, con­sid­er­ing that Tech­no­rati them­selves claim that nofol­low links will not add to a site’s rank. I did the right nofol­low­ing tech­niques, but what could have caused Tech­no­rati to count the links? Then, I real­ized that the flaw was prob­a­bly NOT in the nofol­low, but rather Technorati’s innate abil­ity to “read” JavaScript. That is absolutely amaz­ing… Tech­no­rati skipped the nofol­lowed links, and took the HTML stuff inside the JavaScript, par­tic­u­larly the links which I didn’t nofol­low think­ing that no crawler will actu­ally read JavaScript. I was wrong, Tech­no­rati, you sur­prised me.

So, if Tech­no­rati can read JavaScript, it makes links which appear in JavaScript treated as an out­go­ing link. Then again, if that were true, then Tech­no­rati would have responded and counted a lot more links. Instead, the links now come from only new blogs using the plu­gin, older blogs that used to appear are no longer appear­ing. Seems like Tech­no­rati updated its fil­tra­tion sys­tem to han­dle cer­tain repeated pings.

Tagged as: Flaw, Technorati