Shaun Groves
Technorati confuses the peewaddlin’ out of me. Specifically the way they calculate ”authority.”
A blog can have over 1000 links to it but an authority of less than 500 consistently…apparently. And that number can drop suddenly and drastically. Why?
Here’s the official answer:
Technorati calculates authority by looking at all links from unique blogs from the past 6 months. That means your rank will change daily based upon your blog’s activity from 180 days ago up to today. As older links fall off your count and new links are added, your link count may increase, decrease, or stay the same.
So, if you were needing to find the most influential blogs – blogs with the most unique readers every day, the biggest actual audience – authority seems like a poor metric to go by. What’s the best one?
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euphrony says:
To my way of thinking, Technorati is an authoritative sham. (Yet I still use it.) They actually only count from among their users, I understand, so there is a theoretically large audience out there that is not represented. And of their users, they often miss links, tags, entire posts even, in their indexing and referencing scheme. I guess they only count links from unique sites to avoid stuffing the ballot box, but it still does not make sense. And the staleness age, for dropping links from the authority number, is rather arbitrary.
anne jackson says:
conversation – interaction. i know that’s probably not what you’re looking for, but i think it’s sad when someone has 39873098 subscribers or links but nobody ever talks.
Crystal Renaud says:
i got to 48 once and waited anxiously for 50…. the next day… it had dropped to 32. and i am still trying to recover.
why links can expire…? i have no idea.
John Stickley says:
peewaddlin’?
Just Matt says:
I hear those first 2 blogs on your list there are pretty darn good. Yet they semm to lack your superior authority : )
Shaun Groves says:
Peewaddlin’: n. (origin: Texas) Rural polite replacement for poop.
Seaton says:
You are such a Dad! Only a man who has changed his share of diapers uses the word poop (or its Texas replacement).
mamasboy says:
Staleness makes alot sense to me in that many blogs are seasonal or abandoned. Why continue giving credence to a blog that hasn’t been updated in a month or two, and because of that no longer has much of a following. While 180 days seems arbitrary, the idea of a moving average makes sense. It moves folks down who had a few popular posts but haven’t continued to maintain that level of readership while also allowing a blog that started slowly, but has slowly built a following to reflect that without getting bogged down by past years of light blogging without any readers.
Euphrony’s point that they don’t include anyone but their own members and may have indexing issues is a bigger deal, since the included group could be self-selective and may not truly represent the blogosphere as a whole.
Is it time to come up with another flea market montgomery song to boost your authority? Perhaps a song on Halo 3 would do it. When it comes to increasing authority, increasing diversity in readership would seem to be helpful.
MB