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.
