Technorati has one of the most accurate blog rankings on the Internet. The idea that links between blogs are a sign of popularity is great, but there is a problem of so called “unintended” links appearing on Technorati. Unintended links are links not expected to be appearing as reactions on Technorati.
What links do Technorati count
Technorati count links appearing in posts. After all, that’s probably the most relevant part of the site for Technorati to find links to other blogs (exclusive of those in comments). However, it also counts links that appear near the post. Having widgets with some nice link near a post will leak out some technorati juice. Hence comes the “nofollow” sub-standard that is now popularized by Google.
Nofollow you say?
Like Google, Technorati doesn’t credit nofollow links. However, it credits “external nofollow” links. Weird? It’s an unfortunate side-effect that stems from some crawlers being unable to identify that the nofollowed link is both “external” (i.e. linking to somewhere else not on the site) and a “nofollow” link. External nofollow is used on comments, but because Technorati doesn’t count comments, this problem doesn’t matter. However, if you do use external nofollow on links in and near the post, Technorati mistakenly counts them.
Unintended/invalid links being counted
So, Techorati may count invalid links or links you never expected Technorati to count. You may be thinking it’s great to have that added Technorati responses, but Technorati has a habit of manually banning sites from the top 100. Take photomatt for example — creator of Wordpress. Because his link appears in the default blogroll of Wordpress, he gets thousands of links from numerous blogs — as soon as they are set up. In addition, site-wide links are also known to added to Technorati ranks (counted as only 1 vote of course). Plugins are another source of such links. Nofollowing the links may help, well, if Technorati actually recognises it.
Technorati also had a habit of counting links to the non-blog part of the site as a response. Hence, if your blog resides in the root directory of your site, and someone else links to you to another place (e.g. forum), you may get a Technorati response for your blog. This problem may be due to the way how Technorati handles “pretty” permalinks, and the existance of not-so-standard permalinks.
What Technorati should do
There are other indicators to a site’s popularity — most directly is traffic. What Technorati has done is to count links, which is pretty good considering Yahoo and Google are doing the same. However, if Technorati were to factor in the “traffic” factor (currently done so by BlogFlux), it’s rankings will probably be much accurate. Alternatively, discrediting the invalid links might be another option, which however involves plenty of moderating to do.
