Back in May it looked like Technorati stopped indexing blogs and links correctly. We were told that the issue was a result of the Technorati team moving their servers to a new hosting facility.

Now we’ve learned via Thomas Marban that the Technorati service hasn’t updated their “breaking news” home page in more than four days. Oddly it appears that blog posts are still indexing as my post about the Disney Monorail crash is listed as a “rising” story way at the bottom of the page.

There is news going on across the world (Palin, missiles, hot dog contests, etc.) so not sure what’s up with the homepage not updating in the better part of a week. It sure would be nice to get some positive news out about Technorati one of these days!

Here’s what the home page looks like currently – note the arrows pointing to the time:

It seems like for at least a week now, blog search Technorati has been experiencing some major issues. First I noticed that the blog pages weren’t updating in any sort of timely fashion. Then the search stopped working. For about 36 hours, the “blog pages” are also blank.

There are some notes on the Technorati blog about a server move and yesterday’s post seems to indicate the issues are nearly resolved. Yet 24 hours later the site is still in the same “down” state. If you click on any blog, here’s what you are presented with:

 And here’s what you are presented with if you run a search (this one is for the iphone):

Quantcast shows Technorati with 7.2 million unique users worldwide. Perhaps they would have been better off taking the entire site offline during the move rather than leave a completely broken site live. Funny enough, the ads on the pages have loaded fine all along. I hope they are able to get the system back to normal soon as it seemed like they were getting some positive press as of late.

Last summer Technorati launched an ad network, Technorati Media. In just a couple of months they reported a billion ads served. But how are they doing today?

Steven Finch also wondered about the health of the ad network back in January after speaking with a few publishers. When I look at a random batch of sites listed in their directory, all I see are the same ads on every blog, including the Technorati site. And when I check out sites in the early adopter tech category, it’s also the same set of ads. It’s either the stomach (you know how I feel about this one!), acai berry or pc fix-it ads. Here are a couple of examples of the ads running on the Technorati ad network (this is actually 4 ads):

I spoke with one publisher who told me that the ads are run-of-network. I can only guess that they pay close to nothing and will probably require a click to earn anything.

Considering that Technorati is still regarded as a good place to see link counts (course many counts are wrong), I wonder why they don’t add the ability for blogs to share traffic between blogs. I’ve written many times about the need for discovery and instead of showing the stomach, the acai berry or the pc fix-it, I know if I was running their ad network, I’d rather show ads from other blogs I like. Darren Rowse talked about this method of getting more visibility today.

With so much unsold ad inventory, would you rather show the stomach or help promote other blogs which are promoting yours? I know my answer. Paid ads should always come first but when a paid ad isn’t available, let the publisher choose to display the stomach or ads from their whitelist of sites. I would totally offer up a 125x slot on CN in a rotation with other tech sites I like. (perhaps we should do this anyway!)

I’d be interested in hearing from CEO Richard Jalichandra on how the ad network is doing these days.

Update: Check out Technorati search posts today from Louis Gray and Steven Hodson.

Update: it appears Technorati hasn’t updated pings from any site in at least 24 hours. I assume that means their search and "rising topics" is at least 24 hrs old.

If you are a regular reader of CN, you know that there are few companies I love more than Technorati. Yesterday the service was down for a period of time (apparently the monster escaped) and previously I wondered if Technorati was as good as Alexa. I’ve reached out to the Technorati team a few times but never hear back.

But gosh o golly was I excited to find today a new Technorati site when I loaded it up just a short while ago! There’s more green now as all of the links are green, fonts are a bit smaller and there’s a bunch of Google ads jammed up in there. There’s "all new" Technorati tag pages to help you navigate the Web.

On the positive tip, it looks like the top 100 list has been pushed under the blog navigational tab. Maybe Jalichandra is finally reading CN and realizes there’s more than just 100 blogs online today.

They appear to be pushing their "rising" categories even more on the homepage now — I guess this is because of Google Blogsearch’s changes to their homepage.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with the old site — I would have spent the time on answering customer service emails and making sure the current system works 100% rather than putting some polish on the site. In these tough economic times, it’s the core that will help businesses succeed.

Super popular blog search and blog tracking service Technorati has gone down and the note says I am forbidden. Apparently I don’t have the permission to view the CN page nor the Technorati home page. Last month I wondered if Technorati was now Alexa 2.0. I’d typically be happy to call someone at Technorati to alert them about the outage but there’s no contact information on the site.

Please report in if you are also forbidden from viewing the site due to lack of permissions.

Update: now Technorati is noting that some "monster" has been let loose – perhaps that’s why my count is always wrong!

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again.

We’re currently experiencing backend issues and are working to resolve them as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Ya’all know my thoughts on Alexa. Over the last 18 months, I’ve watched Technorati move and move but they’ve never actually been able to increase their value. In May of 2007, Technorati added an "authority" value which is based on the number of incoming links to a blog over the prior six months. We’ve seen Technorati stop counting (see here and here) several times for days at a time. We need a good blog ranking system and if Technorati could fix their issues maybe they could regain some ground in the blog ranking market.

What’s interesting to me is that Technorai can’t seem to get their counting mechanism in order but they are certainly willing to issue a "state of the blogosphere" report. This past June Technorati launched an ad network. For those of you in the ad network, are the impression counts correct?

I’ve tried working with Technorati on and off since I started CN to get their counting mechanism to be accurate and at least display the same number at all times. This seems to be impossible. Let’s move to the current time and allow me to share why I believe Technorati is Alexa 2.0.

Two weeks ago I attended the Wordcamp NY event and posted a video from Matt Mullenweg’s keynote about the future of Wordpress. The post has received a good number of links so I wanted to see what would happen with my Technorati authority score. On October 11th, CN was at 1,287 authority with a rank of 1,561. While I’ve always believed this is low, I’ve given up trying to get them to correct it. Yesterday I checked my score again and the page displayed 1,283 authority and 1,540 rank. I noticed that the latest stories displayed were two months old so I hit the "ping" button. Boy was that a mistake! Immediately my score dropped to 1,029 authority and 2,194 rank. So within less than a minute, I lost over 600 ranking slots.

Here are some examples that I grabbed over the past 24 hours on a variety of blogs and the discrepancies in their rankings:

Here are two screenshots taking minutes apart for CN:

On the left is the DaringFireball main results page and on the right is the "top 100 blogs" – notice their rank at #95 in the top 100 and #226 on the main results page. We see this with nearly every blog in the top 100.

The Inquisitr – a week ago Duncan noted that he was excited that he passed the 1,000 mark (lower number is better). I don’t think he will be that excited to learn he has lost 1,600 ranking slots in just a couple days – oh wait, on refresh you get another score.

I’ve always said that Technorati has servers that aren’t updating correctly because if you hit refresh enough times, you can see all sorts of different scores. Just like Alexa, when this ranking algorithm is wrong, it affects the income of blogs that are incorrectly ranked. If a company wants to buy an ad campaign on a blog with a rank lower than 1,000 and I incorrectly show up at 2,200, it means a loss of revenue.

I am working on additional ranking analysis looking into the raw counts which I hope to have completed by the end of November. For now, let’s hope that Technorati will actually take a look and get this problem resolved. I’d be happy to try to help Technorati get these issues resolved.

We’ve learned that the Swiss version of Technorati has put itself up for sale this week. The site is called SLUG and indexes about 2,200 Swiss blogs. Currently SLUG shows 460,000 posts in the index which are categorized by topic.

The current "seller expectation" on the auction is 25,000 Euros or $40,000 USD. If you are interested in the auction, it’s being held on Sedo.

The site features a very interesting geo-location map which shows bloggers by location. Click a blogger and see his or her latest posts.