Technorati thinks we still care. (How cute.)

A couple of years ago, Technorati was vital to bloggers. It was the only good search engine really good at indexing blogs. Maintaining authoritiy and rank on Technorati.com was a great way to build a readership, and drive traffic to our blogs. Technorati was also a good way to keep track of who was linking to our blogs.

Well, a lot has changed in two years. Google has become so invasive that it crawls nearly virtual “inch” of the blogosphere now. Bloggers can easily see who is linking to them by going typing in link:domainname.com (e.g. link:forthardknox.com) into a Google search, and receive a list of websites that have linked to the blog, sorted any way they like (click on “options” at the top left of the browser).

Google Page Rank and the Alexa rating are a much better way to track relevance and traffic of a blog right now.

And yet, this morning, I received this from Technorati, as part of a newsletter update:

Why Your Technorati Authority May Have Changed, and What You Can Do About It

Changes in Technorati Authority numbers – there are several reasons these numbers have decreased recently:

As our intent is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis, we stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations.

Due to the vast number of blogging platforms and custom installations out there (and some bloggers who felt we were using too much of their data), we now rely more heavily on RSS and Atom feeds than in the past. Bloggers can control how much of their content they wish to syndicate via feeds. Many blogs only provide partial feeds, we are not always able to get link data from them. Thus, links from these blogs may no longer contribute to your authority.

Finally, to make sure we always know about your updates, please make sure you are pinging us. You can ping us manually from our Ping Page, or learn about configuring your system to ping us automatically on our Help Page. Many blogging services and platforms have a preconfigured option for pinging Technorati and other services.

If you find links to your blog that don’t appear on Technorati, you may want to check that the other blog:

• is claimed on Technorati
• has a full-content feed
• is pinging us with updates.

So, let’s get this straight. In light of its increasing irrelevance, Technorati is increasing the effort that bloggers must make (and the effort they must convince their blogging friends to make) in order to achieve “authority?” They’re making it harder to do something that happens automatically on other search engines?

Whatever…We’d love to want to help you, Technorati, but I’m afraid we’re just a little too busy blogging.

 

Also see: Tracking Incoming Links