Is Technorati A Load Of Shit?
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Nic on 23-05-2007
Tagged Under : Blogging, readers, Technorati
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I must be honest here, I was not much of a ranking person but recently I have been blogging about the topic alot. Technorati is only one of the many targets I have on my hitlist. Technorati was a tool that I had only heard about it in the major geek circles up until recently.
One of two things has happened; 1.I have joined these geek circles (happily) and 2.Technorati went mainstream to a degree.
I am banking somewhat on option 2 here. Now that Technorati is more mainstream than it used to be there are more blogs on the site, a lot of blogs. That means that you can try your damndest to work your way up the rankings on their site but to no avail. I think that there is some sort of common misconception from bloggers like myself: The higher you rank the more hits you get. That might be true to some extent but it just isn’t true in all situations.
Looking at Amatomu’s ranking of blogs in the News and Politics section and focusing on the top 12 one can see that Technorati ranking is not directly proportional to reads in any way shape or form:
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Lets go with the left table above and work our way down:
By Reads in News and Politics (Amatomu):
#1 - East Coast Radio Blog: Does not feature in top 20 by Technorati Ranking
#2 - My Africa: #15 by Technorati Ranking
#3 - Wired Gecko: #4 by Technorati Ranking
#4 - Black Looks: #1 by Technorati Ranking
#5 - It’s almost supernatural: #7 by Technorati Ranking
#6 - commentary: #8 by Technorati Ranking
#7 - the SA Navy etc…: Not in top 30 by Technorati Ranking
#8 - SA Rocks: #2 by Technorati Ranking
#9 - SomeAmongUs: #9 by Technorati Ranking
#10 - The Antidote: #16 by Technorati Ranking
#11 - Urban Sprout: #18 by Technorati Ranking
#12 - Constitutionally speaking: #13 by Technorati Ranking
The East Coast Radio and My Africa blogs are two perfect examples of what I am talking about. They are at numbers 1 and 2 respectively but do not feature predominantly in the Technorati rankings of Amatomu.
Can someone explain this to me? Why do people place so much emphasis on rankings on blog sites like Technorati if they have no real impact? Am I missing something? Am I meant to be waiting to break the threshold somewhere that will all of a sudden open the floodgates to millions of pageviews? Is that threshold 20 000 on Technorati? Is it 10 000 or maybe the top 1000? I just don’t know.
Now it seems as though Technorati has completely removed the ranking system on their site and have listed blogs according to “Authority”. This blogs authority is 65, SA Rocks is 122… how are you looking? Someone please tell me where my authority of 65 puts me? Top 50 000, 60 000?? I am so lost without the ranking!
Then there is always the thought that when you get to number 1000 on the Technorati ranking system that you are not the only blog at number 1000, there are a gagillion other blogs who have
We’re all traffic whores I know, but Technorati assigns authority based on incoming links from other blogs so it has nothing to do with traffic at all. From an SEO perspective I like this as it helps to localise the nature of your links without having to sift through each one. As far as I know you can’t do this in google’s link index yet.
Also:
It gives a nice trend perspective of your relevancy over time.
In valuing your site/domain (for that big acquisition we’re all waiting for!) link relevance and permenancy is almost as important as traffic which can fluctuate wildly.
I like to think it is a good quality yardstick if you are writing content with international relevance - ie how does the world view what you are writing.
Anyhoo, I’ll shut up now…
From a business point of view:
It’s not (all) in the numbers but in the quality of the numbers.
We rather have fewer hits on our sites of people who are really looking forward to experience what we are offering than loads of hits, high rankings, etc. which do not translate in cash.
We are still working on it but this is what happened in de past 5 years:
2002: every 250 hits on our website resulted in a paid visit to our place.
2007: 1 visit (1 or more persons) out of 30 hits.
And this is not bad for an ‘attraction’ which operates in a niche-niche-market.
Since a month or so we operate 2 additional blogsites which generate extra traffic to our website but it will take at least a year to make any conclusion about the quality of these extra hits.
For the statistics minded readers and marketeers: 80 Percent of our visitors find out about us via (a combination of) word-of-mouth, media-exposure and Internet. Internet alone accounts for 20 percent (all rounded figures).
Onefifth of the visitors discover us via touroperators and accommodation in a radius of 100 km.