Technorati Authority: why it sucks
When I moved from joostdevalk.nl to yoast.com, I committed what someone described as "Technorati suicide". Why? Let me explain how Technorati Authority works.
Your Technorati Authority is simply the number of unique blogs linking to your blog over the last 6 months. In my case, yoast.com hasn't been around for 6 months yet, and before that, it was joostdevalk.nl. Of course, joostdevalk.nl has been properly 301 redirected to yoast.com, and has thus taken over all those rankings in all search engines. But not in Technorati.
Technorati choses not to follow 301 redirects, and because of that, I'm now stuck with two different authority scores. At this point, joostdevalk.nl has an authority of 1,520, ranking # 1,271 in Technorati. Yoast.com has an authority of 590, ranking # 5,548. This should be combined of course, in which case I'd have an authority of 2,110, and would almost rank in the top 500!
The stupidest thing? Technorati has followed the redirect, because the page for joostdevalk.nl reflects my new title, and calls it yoast.
Why I even bother? Well because I like the bragging rights associated with having a Technorati top 1,000 blog, and because all sorts of "top blog listings" like the AdAge 150, use Technorati in their calculation of your ranking, and this caused me to drop rapidly.
So, I call upon thee, Technorati, to FIX THIS!
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Erik-Jan Aug 12th, 2008 at 10:49
You can't just add those two numbers because both numbers partly represent the same blogs.
I agree to the rest of your post.
Johannes Aug 12th, 2008 at 10:50
Same with my move from sistrix.com to sistrix.de. No way to transfer Technorati Authority ...
Joost de Valk Aug 12th, 2008 at 11:10
@Erik-Jan: yeah you're right!
@Johannes: sucks eh? It get's weirder, when you check the blog page on technorati for yoast.com, you'll see "blog reactions" from.... joostdevalk.nl! Sigh.
Anup Aug 12th, 2008 at 13:09
Hi Joost. I know what you mean. But I am actually concerned more about losing StumbleUpons. On another site I maintain which is quite popular, there is a LOT of traffic coming from StumbleUpon, some pages have way over 100 stumbles (don't know if that is good or bad), but I am about to lauch a complete site and url redesign tonight, and someone at StumbleUpon told me that they won't be following 301's.
I don't know enough about StumbleUpon to know whether people care about who else stumbled a site/page before they do it, but building up those stumbles over time I understand helps.
I think this may be a general problem with many social bookmarking sites, I imagine...
Joost de Valk Aug 12th, 2008 at 13:19
Hey Anup, yeah, the same issue goes for delicious...
Michael Clark Aug 12th, 2008 at 13:57
Well, luckily for Technorati, in six months, this will be a moot point anyway, as your joostdevalk.nl ranking and history will disappear, right?
Motorbeam Aug 12th, 2008 at 18:19
How does Technorati authority help. Its more to do with pride then anything else.
Giant Aug 12th, 2008 at 22:22
Yes, they inhale sharply. Hey Motorbeam, hard work shouldn't be negated by capricious policies.
Mikael Rieck Aug 14th, 2008 at 17:06
I was just thinking the same as Michael. It is probably easier to just wait out the six months than to have Technorati change anything ;)
moserw Aug 20th, 2008 at 13:14
Tough luck. It happened to me too when I moved from Blogger to hosting my own Wordpress blog. Its really tough to get Technorati or anyone else see your point of view. Just have to carry on I guess.
Jem Sep 8th, 2008 at 14:27
When I moved back to WordPress from my old custom blog system that I wrote in 2005, I had similar problems with links to individual posts, through del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc. The moral of that story would be to only ever *add* content, and not move/remove it, but that never works out :p