I was surfing around through the WordPress site, looking for ways to make my blog even yet more awesome, when I followed a link to Technorati, did an ego search on my own blog and had a bit of a WTF moment when I found I had more “authority” than a lot of blogs way more popular than mine.
Because of the weird way they calculate this, based on referring links, I realized that I have been a bad neighbor. As a blogger, instead of leaving long comments on other people’s blogs, what I *should* do is make a small comment, then go into greater detail on my own site while pointing back to the original article on the other blog.
That’s what blogs are for, right?
So resolution for me and, I hope, for other bloggers who want to help their neighbors: If someone writes something interesting, comment about it on your own blog and link back! Sure, this is Basic Blogging 101, but I’ve been taking and not giving back by just leaving comments on other people’s blogs but not giving any link-back love from my own.
6 thoughts on “Good blogs make good neighbors.”
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You’ve been blogging a lot longer than some of us… Though Ryan Shwayder’s Nerfbat only has a 6… which is pretty sad on his part.
I’m sure you could ‘game’ blogging, once you figure out the ranking criteria for things like Technorati.
@alma — if y ou look down the links, you’ll see some spam blogs are gaining authority precisely BECAUSE they are gaming it. The whole thing is crazy and arbitrary and the authority value means little, imho. However, it does point out good blogging policy 🙂
Damn farmers get everywhere… 😉
I was sat last night, trying to remember who it was that wrote a really good blog article on gaming technorati and its chums when I found that Jeff Freeman’s having ratings issues too…
I’m at 90 something last I checked. I have no idea how it works or if that’s even good. *shrug*
A ridiculously low authority (like nerfbat’s 6) is really a failure of technorati, rather than something that Ryan (for example) has done wrong or even needs to worry about. If technorati can’t find a way to fix it, then it’s technorati that suffers – by being less useful and so used less. Meanwhile Ryan S will just keep doin’ what he’s doing, and he’s got a Google pagerank of 5, and if technorati cannot be trusted, then Google is all that matters anyway.
That’s essential the problem. Technorati used to be real useful, especially since Google didn’t have a blogsearch thing at the time. Then the spam blogs were gaming it to the point that it wasn’t useful. The main thing is does for you is to tell you what blogs are talking about you, and if it tells you 100 blogs are, but 99 of them aren’t really blogs at all – just spam pages reblogging the stuff from that 1 blog you’d like it to show you, then it just doesn’t work…
The authority system was implemented to sort all that mess out. Splogs would have little or no authority (because no one links to a splog), while legitimate blogs would have authority which increased the more people linked to it.
As I wrote elsewhere, to me it seems like the authority system works pretty well for fairly big/popular blogs – giving them an authority over 200 (which few splogs manage to fake their way up to). It also seems like it is a complete failure for the vast majority of blogs, giving them some willy-nilly authority rating between 1 and 100. Since the splogs pretty much all have authority in that same range: it’s the same there not being an authority system at all and we’re right back to it not being useful.
Additionally, Google has blogsearch now, and the results there are far superior to technorati’s even if it weren’t infected with so much spam.
And now WordPress is switching from technorati to Google blogsearch… very bad news for technorati.
Anyway….
An authority of 90 is pretty good, really… if you made a post that I was searching for there, there wouldn’t be too many (if any) splogs ahead of you. But that’s how that works: your authority being higher is good for me (and anyone else searching technorati). It really doesn’t matter to you what your own authority is, because you already know where your blog is located and what is on it. 🙂
Unfortunately, that also means that in order for it to really work for me – everyone with a legit blog needs to have a legit authority, and none of the splogs.
So one person here or there with a rating that isn’t too low ultimately doesn’t matter (to that person or anyone else).
I feel kinda bad for complaining about it, ’cause it really sucks for Technorati.