Technorati Blog

Where did all my authority go?

There have been a lot of questions, discussion, and speculation about why many claimed blogs display with very low authority and without any recent posts on the new Technorati site.

As anyone who used our search functionality on the old site in the past year knows, one of the major problems Technorati has been battling is how to provide good, useful search results without them being poisoned by spam, scrapers, free article reposters, and the like. We obviously failed at cleaning the data after it got into our search set, as we had numerous spam blogs with authorities in the hundreds.

Our solution, as briefly described in our Indexing FAQ and Blog Claiming FAQ, is to work from a known clean data set. It probably won't ever be perfectly clean, but try some popular keyword searches on the new site and you'll see the tremendous improvement. Sites that we have added to the clean index are being crawled, having detailed authority calculated, display recent posts (one at the moment) on our site, and contribute to other sites authority.  We are continuously adding more and more sites to this index, and are working on ways to do so faster, but as you can imagine, the volume of sites to qualify is enormous.

Despite some of the speculation & hyperbole you may have seen, the only judgment call that can be inferred here is that, if a site is in the index (has higher authority and displays recent posts), then Technorati is pretty certain that it is a true blog (or news site -- we have those too).  If you find any sites getting that treatment that do not belong, please feel free to let us know in the Site Details page comments on Technorati.com, or over at GetSatisfaction/Technorati.  But as far as reading our minds goes, that's it.  If a site is NOT in our clean set, it doesn't mean anything other than that, today, that site is not in our index. It does not mean we have any opinion about the site and is not an assessment on the site's quality, worth, or usefulness.  It's a safe bet that we just haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

As I said, we are continuously adding new sites, and are investigating ways to speed up & optimize that process. We hope to have a way for Technorati community members to nominate or sponsor additional sites as well, but that will be further down the road.

A Totally New Technorati.com & Technorati Media Rising

Today is a significant day.  Not only did comScore rank Technorati Media as the fifth largest social media property, we’re also pleased to announce the re-launch of a wholly new Technorati.com. Technorati was founded to help people find great blog content, and with this launch, we’ve improved some of the existing ways and added a couple new ways.

The Technorati.com beta site you see today has literally been rebuilt from the ground up. When you take a look at the new site, you’ll see some things you like, and you’ll notice some things that are gone (some of which will be back soon). But we guarantee you’ll see a more stable site that helps you find the blog content you’re looking for. We’ve already gone into a lot of the “why” behind the changes, so without further ado, here’s what’s changed.

Technorati Authority

In the past, we based Technorati Authority on six months of blogosphere data. Because most searches are looking for items less than a month old, we’re going to narrow that window in a similar way. In the past, because the data window was so long, Authority and the Top 100 lists it powered were relatively static.  With the new algorithm, the resulting Authority will better reflect the fast-changing nature of the blogosphere.  Its new inherent volatility will also show which blogs are rising and falling in authority, rewarding authors on posting frequency, context and linking behavior, as well as other data inputs.

We are also excited to announce Topical Authority. As opposed to overall Technorati Authority, Topical Authority is limited to a specific category. Some blogs may rank in more than one category.

Search

Our search previously prized recency above all else – the real time web – and the old algorithm delivered the last result, not the best. As many high authority blogs have earned a mainstream media status, we’ve added more weight “relevancy” to deliver the most relevant results from authoritative sources while still acknowledging timeliness. Simply put, when you do a search, the results should be a lot better.

Improved blog directory

The new blog directory is vastly improved.  Of note, you can now view top blogs overall by Authority, AND top blogs by category by Authority.  The results are something readers have requested for years: Top Lists for major categories, AND the daily risers and fallers in each category as well.

Original articles

Bloggers can now directly publish articles on Technorati.com.  This provides a unique opportunity and yet another way for authors to present their content to a larger audience, directly by presenting articles to millions of readers and indirectly by receiving traffic from links back to their own blog or site.  Conversely, it also provides the audience yet another way to discover great content and new authors.  Down the road, we envision further opportunities for some participating authors who may choose to also join Technorati Media.  As this is a totally new feature, we want to stress that this is additive to the discovery process: readers will still be able to search algorithmically selected content, browse the directory for blogs in favorite categories and now read a selection of in-depth articles. Find out how you can contribute an article.

What’s gone for now?

With six years of history behind us, we have also discovered what’s important and not important in our offerings.  As such, some things will go away permanently, and others will return later with enhanced utility that reflects the new features of the site.  Here’s what’s coming back shortly after launch:

• Technorati Charts and API: both will be returning later
• Widgets – For those sites with widgets on their sites, there’s no need to worry.  Some widgets will continue to serve as they have in the past, and some that utilized legacy Technorati technology will either change slightly or temporarily disappear without any affect on web pages. Technorati will be developing some exciting new widgets that match the new features in the site.
• s.technorati.com is still there, but it’s moved to the main site at Technorati.com/search
• Watchlists are gone
• Some (but not all) RSS feeds.

And a special mention to our partners:

• JS-Kit for providing comments
• ShrinkTheWeb for providing site thumbnails
• Get Satisfaction for support

And finally, we want to thank all of the publishers that are part of Technorati Media. In the 15 months since we launched, Technorati Media has grown into the largest social media advertising network.  With over 400 influential blogs and niche social networks and communities, the network reaches 108 million monthly unique visitors.  We enable marketers to engage with social media at scale by approximating the audience reach of a large social network. Our publishers have enabled five quarters of consecutive growth, and the new Technorati.com.

Next week, we’ll release the 2009 State of the Blogosphere report (with a preview at Blog World Expo this Friday). This is our biggest effort yet with a survey executed by the well known political polling firm Penn Schoen and Berlind, interviews from more than a dozen of today’s most successful professional bloggers, and additional data sources.

Technorati Media Makes comScore's Top 50 Web Properties List

Technorati Media reached another milestone this week: we made comScore's Top 50 Web Properties list for August 2009!!  After launching our social media ad network just over a year ago, this is a fantastic validation of hard work and the cooperative partnership with our publishing partners. 

 

While we're very happy to enter the list at #49, we're looking forward to and also certain to report even larger audience numbers as we continue to grow the Technorati Media network.  This growth helps us deliver our core value to marketers: enabling brands to engage in social media at scale.  This in turn also benefits our publishers, as we're able to introduce them to more marketers.

 

Aside from this great news, we have a number of significant development to be announced over the next month. Stay tuned!!

Why Your Technorati Authority May Have Changed and What You Can Do About It

Changes in Technorati Authority numbers: There are several reasons that these numbers have decreased recently, some of which we've already discussed:

As our intent is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis, we stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations.

Due to the vast number of blogging platforms and custom installations out there (and some bloggers who felt we were using too much of their data), we now rely more heavily on RSS and Atom feeds than in the past. Bloggers can control how much of their content they wish to syndicate via feeds. Many blogs only provide partial feeds, we are not always able to get link data from them. Thus, links from these blogs may no longer contribute to your authority.

Finally, to make sure we always know about your updates, please make sure you are pinging us. You can ping us manually from our Ping Page, or learn about configuring your system to ping us automatically on our Help Page. Many blogging services and platforms have a preconfigured option for pinging Technorati and other services.

If you find links to your blog that don't appear on Technorati, you may want to check that the other blog:

• is claimed on Technorati
• has a full-content feed
• is pinging us with updates

How to Use the Media in Social Media

How should marketers use social media as a marketing vehicle? First remember the "media" in "social media". There are obviously wonderful viral and engagement opportunities in social media, but it's important to remember that there's a pure media play necessary if any type of consistent scale is to be achieved. Lee Odden interviewed Richard Jalichandra about this after a panel at SES: here's a video of the conversation.

Authority Recalibrating

About six months ago, we started shifting large numbers of blogs over to our new crawler starting in February and finishing things up in March. The new crawler brought many advantages, among them is that it does a much better job of focusing on post contents. As part of the switch, we intentionally stopped indexing links outside of posts, including blogroll links, which don’t signify the relevance of an author’s intent to link to specific content. Technorati is tracking what is being actively discussed in the blogosphere; a static link doesn't tell us if there's anything of particular interest there right now. This change is now showing up in Technorati Authority numbers. As the blogroll links indexed by the old spider age past 180 days, they are no longer included in Authority calculations.  We expect Authority numbers to continue to drop for the next 5-6 weeks until the last of the blogroll links age past 180 days. The resulting Authority numbers will be lower than they were last month, but will be a better indicator of how much attention a blog is actively receiving.

The new crawler also relies more heavily on feed data. To be certain that your full posts and all of your links are indexed, please provide a full-content feed. As some blogs only provide partial or plain-text feeds, we may not collect links from those posts.

As a further heads-up, we’re currently working on a new Authority Rank algorithm for launch later this year. This new algorithm will represent a fairly significant change, but also one that more closely represents the live web of today. Stay tuned!


As those of you who follow us on Twitter know, there was a system failure early last week that caused Authority numbers to drop; we have recovered that data and the current Authority numbers are correct. If we've indexed a post of yours in the past few days, then you should be seeing your full authority.

Get a Small Business Makeover

AT&T has just launched a site site designed by and for small business owners and we have to say, it looks pretty good: expert advice on everything from technology to marketing, case studies, consulting help, you name it. To celebrate, the company is giving away Small Biz Tech Makeover -- more than $5,000 of stuff.

They want to know what you think about the new site features, advice and solutions. If you like it, or if you don't, and you want to write a review, please be sure to tag your post with AT&TInSite so it appears on the Technorati tag page.

You can also give your readers the chance to enter the AT&T Small Biz Tech Makeover online contest (you can enter too!). Expert advice and one year of free AT&T products and services will be awarded to the small business owner who can best explain his or her need for a technology makeover.

All you and your readers need to do to participate is complete an online form and send us a short video with your story. You can enter here.

Disclaimer: AT&T is a Technorati client.

We’ve Got Passes to Give Away to the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, August 10-14

The Search Engine Strategies Conference takes place August 11-14 in San Jose. Yep, we’re going: social media is taking center stage with keynotes from Clay Shirky and Charlene Li.

Even better, a one-day ClickZ conference on the 11th, Social Media & Online Video , rounds things out with best practices and case studies in these (relatively) new channels. Keep an eye out for Technorati’s CEO Richard Jalichandra speaking on this panel with execs from Meebo and YouTube:

In the Now: Conversational & Real Time Marketing

With the advent of Twitter, micro-blogging, and mobile video, the publishing model has been turned on its head. How can marketers take advantage of these new tools? This panel will discuss topics ranging from social media's role in the Iranian elections to Ashton Kutcher.

Best of all, we’ve got passes to give away. To enter to win, just Twitter @technorati using the hash tag #sesrati.

We’ve Launched Twittorati - Discover Where Blogs and Tweets Converge

We’re asked all the time how platforms like Twitter and Facebook are impacting the Blogosphere. This is what we’re seeing: Twitter is not replacing blogs, but it has evolved as a major awareness vehicle for bloggers and people who read blogs (same goes for Facebook status updates). So the idea behind Twittorati was to allow people to view the topical geist that the most influential bloggers are tweeting and blogging about. We say this is where the Blogosphere meets the Twittersphere, but what does that mean? Twittorati shows what top bloggers are tweeting about, and how these trends compare to Blogosphere trends. You’ll be able to filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading Blogosphere and twitter trends. We’re featuring the Technorati Top 100 Bloggers at launch, but we’re going to expand very soon to include the many more authors in the active Blogosphere. You can find the Twitter content most relevant to them, compare the day’s top blog and hash tags to see the hottest topics in both spheres, as well as see the most popular links that are being tweeted and which blogs are linking to them. You can also really dig into the information source: writer pages display each tweeter’s blogs and Twitter information and Technorati Authority. Please reach out and let us know what you think … And special thanks to Sawhorse Media, publisher of Muckrack.com and VentureMaven.com, who helped us produce the site.

A tumultuous month at Technorati

It’s been a tumultuous month. For us – and unfortunately for you. We’re sorry for the frustration and the less than great service. While not an excuse, here is the reason: We changed co-location facilities. We, well the four members of our ops team, moved 1,000 servers and ALL of our real-time search infrastructure. Things are now returning to normal, although slower than we would have liked. Looking forward: We haven’t lost any data – so when things are back to normal your link counts and authority will be exactly where they should be. We’ll follow up in more detail so you have information on exactly which services have been affected and how, and when they’ll be completely functional again.