Break Into Technorati’s Top 100 In A Jiff

May 14, 2007

Follow this link to learn how: Get into Technorati Top 100 in 24 Hours.

Basically what you do is create a bunch of blog pages that link back to your blog and manually ping each blog page using their ping page.

I didn’t do it because it annoys Technorati and if they find out they’ll probably ban me. But…

1. It means links on pages aren’t noticed by Technorati. So, if you keep a links page like I do, you should manually ping that page every now and then so it counts for Technorati. When I give link love, I want it to count. The links on my links page are my absolute favorite links. I think I like them better than the links in my blogroll, but if Technorati doesn’t count them, then that’s not fair. (For the record, Technorati only counts links in your feed and on your index page.)

2. It points out yet another flaw of Technorati. Engetch says,

“It’s a very old hole in Technorati that they never seem to be intent on fixing. They fix the symptom (correcting any blogs that people report) instead of fixing the problem.”

I remember John Chow* saying he did something similar. At the time I thought it was wrong to intentionally take advantage of a hole in Technorati’s algorithm. But now that this flaw has been exposed for so long and Technorati still won’t fix it, I think it’s fair game.

But here’s the rub: if enough bloggers decide to do this all at the same time, Technorati’s ranking system would be screwed up for a week or more. And Technorati can’t call foul because there’s nothing in their TOS prohibiting it. It’s not abusive because you’re not running any scripts or making their system work overtime, you’re just manually pinging pages that Technorati doesn’t count. It’s really in THEIR best interest to fix the hole.

3. Technorati should fix their algorithm. It’s NOT COOL for Technorati to continually refuse to fix their algorithm and shuck their responsibility. Just because most people are like sheep and are easily controlled doesn’t mean they should be controlled.

4. As it stands, Technorati only serves their top 100 bloggers. They send little to no traffic to the rest of us. Their search isn’t as good as Google’s blogsearch. They take forever to handle support requests. Their top 10 searches list sucks because it’s mostly meaningless stuff (like “YouTube”).  If Technorati wants to have a technical presence and not just a meaningless media presence, they need to stop getting facelifts and start improving their algorthim. Or they need to take on the role of a media company and start producing their own content. Or, they should make their site private and market themselves to behind the scenes investors, advertisers, and the top bloggers because those are the only people who can benefit from their ridiculous “service.”

*I don’t really like John Chow. I think his methods are sleazy and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like him in real life. But he’s still worth reading every now and then if only for amusing anecdotes of how he gets banned from this or that service.

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Posted by Elaine Vigneault | Filed Under Google, Internet & Technology, Technorati 

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Comments

3 Responses to “Break Into Technorati’s Top 100 In A Jiff”

  1. engtech on May 14th, 2007 10:57 am

    Instead of exploiting Technorati to get better results, I think the solution is to ignore them altogether. What do any of us really get from them? Yet I’ve found myself jumping through hoops so that they’ll index my blog properly, etc etc.

    It’s nice to see the rank number go up, but the amount of time we spend thinking or talking about them… for what?

    http://www.kottke.org/05/08/so-long-technorati

  2. Elaine Vigneault on May 14th, 2007 11:27 am

    That gives me an idea… :)
    A post on how to boycott Technorati. Basically, alternatives to the few features we actually use.

  3. engtech on May 15th, 2007 11:35 am

    It is a good idea.

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