What Have You

After posting an article titled Understanding Your Alexa Rank, here is the article that deals with another site metric – the Technorati rank.

This is not a new topic to old bloggers (I’m not referring to the age of the blogger but the age of the blog or the blogger’s total time spent on blogging). On the other hand, for new and newer bloggers, this article could be of big help. First off, the comparison of these site metrics - while the Alexa rank measures traffic, the Technorati rank measures the number of links to your site or articles. The connotation about this site metric is that, like Alexa rank, when your Technorati rank is represented by a lower number, then your perceived rank is higher.

Submitting your blog or “claiming” your blog in Technorati (as it is technically termed) is as easy as opening an email account in Yahoo. Just create an account by providing a username, password, and blog details to claim it. If you have more than one blog, that is also possible as you only need to repeat the process. Some of the important terms that you have to understand in Technorati are: Fans, Blog Reactions and Authority.

Screenshots of my Technorati profile can be seen below for your perusal and better understanding.

Figure 1. The Profile Page

 

Figure 2. The Blog Details Page

Figure 1 shows the page where you can see the blog/s that you have claimed. But note that it’s NOT really a requirement to claim your blog. It’s not even a requirement to create an account with Technorati but having an account has its advantages since you can easily navigate and determine your blog/s’ details if you will claim your blogs. However, if you’re just concerned with the info relative to your blog, you may go directly to Technorati.com and type in your blog URL/s in the search box and there you go. The details will be right before your eyes.

For some definition of terms:

Fans. This is the number of people who faved your blog/s by simply clicking the Favorite it button within your blog details (Figure 1). This is represented by a white heart within a small rectangle with rounded corners. This can also be done if a blog has a Fave button in it which looks like the green rectangular button found at the end of this post and the home page. It has a text saying “ADD THIS BLOG TO MY TECHNORATI FAVORITES”. Try clicking one to see for yourself how to become a fan of this blog, even for experimentation purposes only.

Authority. This is the measure of validated links to your site (Figure 1). If you’re into paid blogging, this number is the basis of networks in determining your blog’s worth based on sites linked to yours.

Blog Reactions. This is the total citation your blog receives from other sites either through reciprocal links (two-way links) or links from within someone else’s post.

Authority and Blog Reactions are most of the time NOT equal. In fact, Authority has always been lower than Blog Reactions for all the blogs I’ve seen in Technorati right from the start my account was created. I’m not really sure why this is the case but it could be that the Authority is a measure of validated links that have been counted as points to your site. The basis for this is unknown but I suspect that in order for your site to claim these points, the site/s that are linked to yours must be updated and successfully “PINGED”. At times when Technorati was suffering from technical problems with their servers, no site was updated for the longest time, hence, Authorities remained the same. Up to this time, Technorati is unable to successfully update sites in their database once in a while.

I have also observed that the length of your article has something to do with the possible increase (or update) in your Technorati authority. In my experience, even if the blog reactions are constant at different times, the amount of increase in this blog’s Authority is variable – when my published article is short, the increase in Authority is low (1-3) but when my published article is long, the increase in Authority is high (4-7). The Authority must be correlated with the amount of data crawled by Technorati’s robots. This is just a speculation but a valid one. I’ve noticed this many times before because I won’t be writing about this topic had I not conducted some form of research prior to this write-up. However, at times, even when I don’t update this blog, my Authority increases without notice which is primarily due to other bloggers who have updated their sites (that are linked to me). Remember, the condition is, the number of Blog Reactions is constant. This implies that if you are linked to other blogs that are frequently updated, your Authority has a better chance of increasing. This wouldn’t be possible without your participation also. You have to update you r blog as well to gain the increase.

Ways to Increase Your Technorati Rank

Participate in Memes. To increase your Technorati rank, you could either participate in memes to pass around links to and from your blog to others. This is perhaps the easiest way to increasing Technorati rank because it requires very little effort. All you have to do is copy and paste an article and pass it around by tagging everyone you want. Personally, my Technorati rank will not grow as much as others may want to for their blogs. First, I’m not really into memes and tagging. My orientation as a blogger is inclined towards writing good articles, not passing around memes that in my view have very little or no importance to me and my readers.

On the other hand, using this technique is very useful if: you’re lazy to write good articles and you want to increase your pedigree for paid reviews. I mean no offense but I’ve seen so many blogs whose contents are 80-100% memes and guess what? Their Technorati ranks are 10 times this blog even if their sites are still a month old! Lol!

I believe what prompts these bloggers to do this is to meet the minimum requirements of ad networks in terms of Technorati rank and number of posts. A meme is still a post. So, to qualify for paid review programs, some bloggers do this. Well, who can blame them? It’s not easy to come up with good articles. However, with a virtually all-meme blog, who will be interested to go back to their sites? Even for frequent bloghoppers, this could be a turn-off. Most bloghoppers who go back to others’ sites have an implicit need to learn and discover new things apart from memes. For meme blogs (if I may categorically call them), the best chance to get traffic is through bloghopping for hours and/or dropping Entrecards because at Entrecard, most people won’t mind whatever is the blog’s content. They, too, are after the credits they can earn from dropping the highest possible number of cards at the shortest possible time. This goes to show that generally, if your blog cannot offer good articles to possible loyal readers, find ways to generate traffic from other sources. Definitely, don’t expect the search engines to provide you with a high volume of traffic.

Link Bait Spammers/Scrapers. Spammers/scrapers are those who steal contents from blogs. Usually, these are robots that search for specific keywords/phrases from articles and copy the contents to other blog/s or website/s just to have contents. The keywords that these robots search are in line with medicine and blogging. Other fields of interest are scraped everyday but these fields are the limits of this blog which I can talk about at the moment. My articles regarding breast cancer, Google Page Rank update, weight loss and opiate detoxification have been scraped many times (at least 3 times per article). Scrapers are thieves. They don’t want to work hard on their blog contents. They steal other people’s contents but want something in return for stealing – a pingback. If you will only take some time to see your Akismet bin, you might find some pingbacks from suspicious sites. Delete them immediately and enjoy a one-way link from thieves and an additional authority in Technorati. Legitimate pingbacks from trustworthy sources are alright but spammers should always be punished.

Write Good Articles. This is not the easiest way to increasing Technorati ranks. It could take time and a lot of thinking. However, if your article is good enough for other people, you might get citations in their site/s which will increase your Technorati rank. Aside from spammers/scrapers, other bloggers may find your article/s fit for citation (if their write-up is related to your post). Also, others could also give you a link if they really like your blog as a whole. With this blog, I have had a few chances to be cited in other blogs that either criticized my article/s or praised me for some good traits or contents. In any case, being cited in other blogs has its benefits in terms of links. More importantly, if your blog or article is cited in other blogs, readers of that blog may be enticed to go to your site either by curiosity or natural interest in your article.

There are other ways to increase your Technorati rank but some of which will not be discussed here for ethical reasons. However, take the following as a good example (just to avoid being fooled by link-crazy bloggers out there):

A blogger will place an auto-linker in one of his sites, say site M. You will then place your link in that site which is basically a dummy site - one that was specifically designed to contain one page which contains nothing but other people’s links. This site has no value whatsoever. It’s usually just a page containing a long list of links whose owners will derive no value or benefit. But there’s a catch, you have to link in your site the blogger’s other site, say site S. This is mathematically described as triangulation. If you’re a bit confused about this and unconscious that you’ve been a victim for so long, then I will provide a simple schematic diagram of this dirty technique to gain one-way links. I’m doing this not because I want you to do this. I’m presenting it here for educational purposes only:

Who will benefit most in this diagram? It’s Site S. You know why? What is linked to your site is a dummy site. A site the blogosphere can live without, an insignificant one that can offer you virtually nothing. However, your site (which you have tweaked, improved, updated and got ranked by Google, Technorati and Alexa) is linked to Site S (all one-way) who is also owned by the owner of Site M. So if you’ll take a good look at Site S’s Technorati Authority, I’m sure it has already reached thousands. Remember, Site M is a dummy site - a negligible entity. It is actually a non-functional site which is only updated when someone places his link in the auto-linker. As such, what do you get when you’re linked to Site M? You guessed it right. You get nothing.

Lesson: If you’re a thinking blogger, qualify the blog and the quality of contents you’ll link to. Is the blog even worth reading and going back to? It’s better to be linked to a site with no PR at but with good contents. A separate discussion on this has been in my archives for a long time. Try using my search box for the terms “Link Exchange” and read the articles in the result page if you have time.

I’ve seen many sites like the one mentioned above. To be honest, this practice is not only unethical and selfish but a pathetic excuse to exert efforts in blogging. Among and between bloggers, respect is earned in most cases by way of demonstrating hard work. I love going back to sites whose owners are really working their ass off just to provide his/her readers good articles. These hardworking bloggers are the types of individual I can take my hats off any given day.

Now, if you think doing the same can make you a problogger, think again. Even if your blog reaches a Technorati authority of 2 million, that won’t make you a problogger. While it’s true probloggers (like John Chow, Shoemoney, John Cow and Darren Rowse) have very high Technorati authorities in the neighborhood of thousands to a few hundreds of thousands, they or their blogs possess more qualities outside the confines of Technorati. Probloggers are active bloggers, with thousands of RSS subscribers and enjoy huge page hits per day because of their good articles. Their articles are cited in many other blogs or sites and are generally revered by their readers. Their every article receives a high number of comments sometimes reaching a few hundreds and their traffic come from various sources like search engines and referrals usually ranging from a few thousands to tens of thousands per day. Unfortunately, the converse of this statement is not necessarily true – “having a high Technorati rank doesn’t imply that you’re automatically a problogger“. You must be fooling yourself thinking that this statement is true. It’s a plain and simple crap. Whoever inculcated that in your mind must be insane for making you believe that you will be a problogger based on a single criterion that is Technorati rank.

In line with this, I was invited one time by another blogger to join a link train which was allegedly designed to increase Technorati ranks and Google Page Ranks. Again, this is a false assumption. For the Technorati part of the statement, I will have to agree (which is in coherence with my claim above stating that participating in memes can increase your Technorati rank). For the Google Page Rank part, I will have to disagree.

Google Page Rank and Technorati Rank are two different and separate site metrics. I will reiterate here the difference (just in case you have not read my previous articles about these topics). Technorati measures or shows the quantity of sites linked to your site. Google Page Rank measures the quality of sites linked to your site. These entities are different although they may be related. In your participation in memes, how sure are you that you’re linked to a site with a good standing with Google? See the difference? Quantity of links can not and will not reflect the quality of those same links so it’s wrong to assume that when you are linked to many sites (say, one thousand sites), your Page Rank will surely increase. This is a false assumption. There is no guarantee that your blog’s PR will increase by being linked to thousands of other sites because the Google Page Rank is based on an algorithm of weights (quality of links), not on quantity. For your enlightenment, try to compare many sites with various PR’s so you’ll find out yourself what I’m talking about here. Try to look at the number of links in those sites’ blogrolls and their PR’s. Many sites out there have PR4 or PR5 but only with a dozen or less links in their blogrolls. Now compare those with sites having at least a hundred links in their blogrolls. Don’t be misled with this blog and the number of links in my blogroll. You see, before I got a PR4, this blog only had about 40 links. When I got my PR after the last Google update, at least 10 people wanted to be linked to this site everyday for the next 4-5 weeks. I gave in to some of the requests especially from Filipino bloggers hoping that I can help them increase their PR someday, somehow. But as of this writing, I have no intention whatsoever to increase the number of blogs linked to this site because my blogroll has become extremely hard to manage. Some of those who were in my blogroll even screwed me by deleting my link in their blogrolls, just to get a one-way link from me starting from the time this site got a PR4. It’s a good thing I check all links once in a while.

In addition, I suggest that you read more about these topics if you’re conscious about PR and Technorati. Don’t be misled and think that your Technorati rank is directly related to you PR. You will only be making experienced bloggers laugh at you if you do that. These two concepts may be related if you’re lucky to be linked to sites which are seen as important by Google, but if the sites you’re linked to are penalized/banned by Google or are considered “bad neighborhoods” because they have been labeled as spams, then don’t even think of extracting any link juice from them. Documentation of linking to “bad neighborhoods” indicate that his will even hurt your PR. Hence, in having too many links (especially two-way), your Technorati rank may go up but your PR may not.

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Tags: Blogging, site metrics

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