Mashable, in celebration of their fifth birthday, have published a Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Blogging. The post begins with a reference to one of the original pillars of blogging: Technorati. Back in the day, every blogger who was anyone made sure their blog was in the Technorati blog search engine and directory.
When we started up our Envato blogs I had an account where I would submit them, and we kept a close eye on how our authority was tracking to see if we would break into the super exclusive club that was the Technorati Top 100. These days the site has really dropped off my radar, so today I set out to see if it still has any relevance?
The Top 100
For me Technorati was always about their top 100 list of the who’s who of blogging. The closest we ever came was when FreelanceSwitch peaked at #200 on their list of blogs, and then began sliding down again when we let up our ferocious link and social media campaigns.
Checking back on the Top 100 today, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Technorati now break up the main top 100 list into sublists like the Top 100 Gadget blogs and Top 100 Business blogs.
That sounded pretty cool, and I thought wow, maybe some of our blogs will be in the top 100 for their niches. After all sites like AppStorm and Tuts+ are pretty well known…It turns out though that Technorati only index blogs that someone has submitted to their directory. A search for “appstorm” yields no results.
Frankly this seems a bit weird to me. Aren’t we in the era of post indexing? Shouldn’t that extend out to blog indexing? How does Google Blog Search determine which sites are blogs so it can search them? There must be a way, right?
Submitting a Claim
So I decided to run a claim for AppStorm in their system to try to register our blogs. We already have an account, so I figured this shouldn’t be too hard. Here’s what happens next:
- First you fill out a bunch of information – that’s fair enough
- Next you get a message saying: “We are evaluating your claim. Evaluation may take some time.”
- So you would think from that message that they will be able to register the claim soon. Nope! It turns out that if you wait a few minutes, they then ask you to publish a post with a claim code that looks like this: 7D3FKZ5A23S5.
- Publishing a post is going to be pretty annoying/confusing for our readers because they’ll be wondering what Technorati even is, and why their regular schedule is getting interrupted. So I publish a post and backdate it to 2008 so it doesn’t appear in the feed.
- Unfortunately it turns out that Technorati insist that you publish a NEW post so they can look through your RSS instead of being given a specific URL to check.
End result: I couldn’t claim any of our blogs without a massive amount of trouble and an annoyance for our readers.
If I can’t submit a claim …
So this begs the question, if I can’t get our network of fifteen pretty darn large blogs into Technorati, are they actually an effective place to search for blogs? Who else is missing? Some of our sites have up to 100,000 RSS readers, so you would think that any decent collection of the world’s blogs would include them.
Does Technorati have anything else going for them?
Technorati have been trying to innovate in a range of new areas, including their Annual State of the Blogosphere Report, the Twittorati site for profiling Twitterers (no AppStorm there either), their People list, a PR/Blogging app and the Technorati Media platform.
But for me personally, I don’t understand how a site that claims to be the fourth largest social media property in the world can do such a poor job of their core purpose.
What do you think?
Do you think Technorati is still relevant in 2010? Or are they just a relic of the early blogging era?
Image Attribution: The awesome Technorati icon at the top of this page is courtesy of Michelle Kirkbride and IconFinder
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Mashable, in celebration of their fifth birthday, have published a Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Blogging. The post begins with ...
Mashable, in celebration of their fifth birthday, have published a Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Blogging. The post begins with ...
Mashable, in celebration of their fifth birthday, have published a Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Blogging. The post begins with ...
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That’s incredible inefficient if you ask me. Having you jump through so many hoops just to register an already massive blog. Personally, I’ve never even gone to the Technorati website(!) I’ve found most of my blogs in an organic way. Most high profile bloggers will get found anyway, and I never needed Technorati to find the Zenhabits, Tuts+ and/or other random huge blogs that fill my RSS reader.
I guess it would have been viable to throw your tracking code in if you were starting your blog today, but I don’t see why they don’t include a different way to index your blog than with very visible(and disrupting) uploading.
But that’s just me
It really is inefficient and disruptive isn’t it!
I actually snuck in the web.appstorm claim code into that post (it’s the “example” code), so that I could at least process a claim for this blog. When I went to claim it after publishing the post, even then I got this message:
“Aug 03, 2010. We have successfully crawled your blog and found the claim token, and your claim is now awaiting review.”
It’s like they really want to make it as difficult and painful as possible for me!
Hahaha. That’s a very clever way to put a tracking code in! I didn’t even realize. The trail of thought going something like “Hmmm….this is really stupid…….wait….I’ll just write a blog post about this whole thing”
Kudos. Well done, but I hope they do streamline their process a little bit.
Way to go Collis. Will there be an update to this post to see where this blog ranks?
I had the same experience you had many years ago. It took me all of a month to realize that the site had no value whatsoever. Never did. Never will.
It’s been so long since they were relavent…I can’t even remember back that far. I remember when Sifry left and I chatted with the new CEO. I think there were two big nails in their coffin. First was their continual infrastructure problems (maybe Twitter should take note). We just got sick of waiting for it to get back up to snuff. I think the bigger nail was when people stopped using “Technorati tags” and switched to internal tags instead. Once there wasn’t that giant cohesive pull…they lost their key asset: us.
It actually gets worse than that. It turns our that they only use links from other registered blogs to count towards a blog’s ranking.
That means that if there are references to blog A on other high traffic blogs such as the AppStorm blogs, that doesn’t get taken into account.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that! I guess maybe there is a hole in the market for a better Technorati … or maybe they’ve let it go because it’s not actually a very profitable business to be in
I’ve gone througn the same annoyng process, I even placed the darn code on a post (white text on white bg to hide it). And, after a WEEK or more I got an answer: Technorati thanked me for interest, but they only index US blogs (mine is not).
So, for the rest of the world, Technorati is truly out.
The claiming process is very annoying indeed and it seems very odd to ask for such a thing in 2010. They could’ve at least allow you to make widget and then they could verify your site for it.
Either they don’t have very smart programmers over there or they just don’t care.
I’m sure a lot of site owners don’t care about Technorati anymore or haven’t even heard of them, considering they don’t get much attention lately.
Same experience here and great to find somebody questioning the process. I ended up leaving my claims unfinished as I too wasn’t prepared to interrupt my much smaller readership. I wonder if all the blogs in their index have gone through this process or if they have some preferential channel?
Let me know if any of you develop the Technorati competitor
Like most here, I’ve gone through the same hoops as well… and really for nothing. The search results on their site feel canned compared to real engines, and it’s a dead name in to even average bloggers. About the only reason I used to entertain the process was to up a little Google ranking, but I see nothing it’s done for the 20+ sites I maintain with a team at my Art Director day job.
It’d be interesting to know how they float financially, anyone know? All sponsorship an ads?
First time I’ve heard of Technorati. Might as well pay for a phone book listing.
I just started my first blog last week, and found the process to be absolutely ridiculous. I jumped through all their hoops, but ended up having my blog rejected for not being written in English. Every single word on my blog is written in English. Sure, I mainly feature images and I’m not from an English-speaking country myself, but the header, footer, about page, etc. is all in English. I gave up after writing them, haven’t heard back yet. If this is the way they treat their users, Technorati will slowly become obsolete.
I used to use Technorati to search blogs.
Then at some point, they had the bright idea of de-emphasizing their blog search and cluttering the results with all kinds of other crap. So I never went back.
Oh, Technorati… back in the days….
It’s been also some time since I last checked the site. Easily a couple of years. Back then I primarily used it as a link baiting system, I guess today there are so many other ways to do that that they lost some purpose.
They should definitely rethink their inclusion system.
Also, they don’t accept non-english blogs anymore. So mine is out.
Ah, and of course, they tell you this AFTER you have published that nonsense code inside your latest post…
In early spring 2006, after I started my first and still primary blog (I have eight, but the others are either occasional or mirrors), after having had various free Web sites with other titles since ca. February, 2000, I excitedly registered with Technorati.
Well, I got as many as 90 or so hits, in terms of other blogs discussing my work (“reactions”), but my Technorati page never took off and, considering that I’ve been mentioned by other blogs thousands of times (i.e., many of the same blogs frequently mention me), never reflected reality.
I just went back and checked my ranking, after a year or two away. They have me at 5,284, which may not be bad, depending on what list I’m on, and “authority” of 482, which is pretty good for the political blog of a single writer. (I just went back and tried to find my ranking, and relative to what, but hit a dead end!)
http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/politics/page-25/
I hit every political blog list there, and went to my “authority” ranking of 482, which is very respectable, but found my blog listed nowhere.
I checked reactions, and got only three. I checked for articles discussing me, and got zero.
Although I post almost daily, and get search engine numbers of anywhere from 45,000 (Google) to 1.6 million (Bing), I’m no heavyweight. And so, I decided to compare my results with those of a heavyweight.
Steve Sailer, love him or hate him, is one of the world’s most popular political bloggers, with millions of page views per year. I punched in the name of his blog, isteve.blogspot.com, and got “0.” I punched in his name, and got “1” reaction.
That settles it. Technorati no longer has even virtual value, assuming it ever did. But that begs the question: How could something that is an illusion, even in cyberspace, get a Google number of 175 million?
(BTW, Alexa lists me as having founded my primary blog under its present title in 2000, so it isn’t perfect, either.)
On Technorati, they’re dead. I plan to remove all of my Technorati tags today, no reason to link back to them.
Yay! Someone that feels my pain
Once Technorati tags lost favor it was pretty much all over, although once you claim a blog.. what can you really do with it??
It would be better if it were more individualistic and not reliant on bloggers knowing about them and then knowing that they have to submit a blog claim if they want to be “cool”.
A solution I have used to the issue of having to post the validation token is to place it in the next post I publish to the blog, at the end, and with the font in the same colour as the background of the blog, e.g. white on white. Technorati still picks it up, and it won’t be visible to the mahority of readers.
Recently I’ve been evaluating the current potential versus the past performance of blog directories, aggregators, etc. – all the typical places that in 2008 everyone swore you had to use in order to build back links. The results for my blogs over the last year have been dismal that it’s no longer worth my time to include links in my side bar to places like Blog Catalog in exchange for having my blog listed on their site.
That said, Technorati is one I would remove if it wasn’t for the fact that I opted to annoy my readers by putting the claim code in a new post and since I have been included on their site, well, it’s fine staying there on my page I suppose.
But to the point I was originally trying to make before that tangent, year to date Technorati has not delivered any significant amount of traffic to my blogs. Understanding that my authority level is very low, 110 is my highest rating, but even then according to Google Analytics I’ve received only 16 visits from technorati.com – now that said, I’m sure there are people who may have seen my blogs and then maybe typed in the url or saw a comment and typed in the url from there, but even being generous and saying 20 people came to site between Jan and Sep of 2010 tells me it’s not worth my time. Not when I can stumble a new post and get anywhere between 10 and 800 visits to it in less time.
However the counter to this is that if you have been a long member of the site and have made it into the top 100, you’re not going anywhere and you’re probably generating a decent amount of traffic, of course, it still doesn’t take any effort on your part at that point to stay there, or even be active in the Technorati community.
I think as we move forward bloggers directly connecting to other bloggers is a better way to go, and probably more relevant that way than relying on these directory sites. After all, who cares about DMOZ anymore? It’s not needed to help index your pages in Google or Bing and it’s been so devalued by Google that it doesn’t even come up that often in Google Searches anymore, for general sites, I’d recommend making a *good* Wikipedia page or even creating an AboutUs.org page.