why does technorati keep missing links?

Like most bloggers, I use technorati to keep track of the cross-blog conversations I’m part of. I’ve always found it a really useful tool and even once wrote a post with 8 suggestions on how to improve technorati.

Recently, however, I’ve found that technorati misses a lot of inbound links, even those from highly rankedd sites that you’d think they’d pick up on. For example, this link from Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine last week doesn’t show up at all in my technorati search results for cybersoc.com. Also missing are links I got a few months back from the Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars and other technorati top 100 blogs.

Why? It might be something the sites themselves are doing, like putting in no follow tags to keep those they link to from benefiting from those links in their technorati ranking but a casual glance at their html source code doesn’t show anything like that happening. This leads me to believe that the problem is with technorati itself.

I’m not particularly hung up on technorati rank but I do want and need a tool that helps me keep track of converations and that’s exactly why, according to a recent interview with the Guardian, Dave Sifry created the service in the first place.

It’s nice when something does what it says on the tin but I’m growing increasingly aware that technorati doesn’t, at least for me, quite manage to achieve that. Sadly, there’s not an viable alternatives either – or are there?

4 Comments

  1. Robin
    I have found the same problem. SlimStat’s new and recent domains gives me a faster and more reliable guide to people who have linked to me. If they do not show up on Technorati I use its “ping us” link to get them to check the other site and that usually works.
    Andrew

  2. Hi Andrew. I find lots of missing links to cybersoc.com via statcounter, which I reckon is similar to the SlimStat’s service you’re using. This morning alone, and tracking only the most recent 100 visitors, statcounter see’s inbound traffic coming off of links to my blog from the following:
    http://www.abcdigitalfutures.net/?p=760
    http://know-the-world.net/blogs/index.php?blog=2&cat=17
    http://www.komunikacii.net/
    http://www.buzzmachine.com/ (which I mention in this post)
    Only the second of those isn’t listed on Technorati and they’ve all been updated, according to technorati, in the last hour or so (although their links to me are slightly older). So come on technorati, why aren’t you spotting links from blogs in your directory to other blogs in your directory?

  3. I’ve asked our engineers to look into the issue, definitely sounds like a Technorati bug (especially the buzzmachine link).
    Sometimes we miss links because the blogs don’t ping us, or because the sites are classified as spammers. I’m not making any implications here, just reporting on why you might not see a link in your technorati results…
    Dave

  4. Hi Dave, thanks for the comment. That’s all well and good, but we’re talking about sites like Buzzmachine, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, and if my memory serves me correctly Huffington Post as well. Those are all Technorati top 100 blogs, definitely not splogs, but technorati seems to have lost the links.
    I’ve been able to find all the blogs bar one from the list of four above in Technorati as well so, I assume, they aren’t classified as splogs by Technorati either.
    Statcounter is, at least at the moment, doing a much much better job of keeping me up to date on where my traffic is coming from, and what conversations I’m part of.
    The only reason I’m whinging is because I desperately want Technorati to be even better!! If I didn’t care, I would have just quietly stopped using it without thinking anything of it.
    Thanks again for stopping by.
    :-)

Comments are closed.