Welcome to Alexa 2.0: Technorati

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.