Technorati links mystery

Technorati gives this blog a level of authority that could be considered pretty generous,given the unauthoritative nature of most of our posts. However, for the uninitiated, in Technoratispeak, “authority” refers to how popular you blog is, determined by how many other blogs link to it, not by how authoritative your content is (mercifully…).

But, links to us from the Atheist Blogroll that I can actually see on my screen – and that send visitors to us, according to FireStats – haven’t been listed for months.

I’ve tried researching the reasons for this, unsure whether the fault lies with our code (that would hardly be a first), our recent attempts to restyle the site (not an unmitigated success, yet), Technorati or the Atheist blogroll’s code.

I am none the wiser. This appears in Technorati’s explanation for why links may not get picked up.

If the link was in a blogroll, you may want to check to see if the hyperlink to your blog is located in the blog source of the blogroll. Blogroll links that are generated via a tool or script are not seen. The blogroll must reside in the blog home page as well. If the blogroll is in a subsection or directory of the site, it is not seen or picked up

On an experimental basis, I visited the most recent posters (at the top of the blogroll list on the left.)

onegoodmove.org doesn’t actually show the blogroll, nor have a link to Technorati that I could have used to check if it picks up the link from us.

Sans God has us on the Blogroll, on the index page and not below the so-called jump (other Technorati forum reasons for not seeing links) When I looked for blogs that link to Sans God, I see: “Why Dont You Blog? by Admin Istrator · 44 days ago ” Well no. It rather looks to me as if we linked to them today and yesterday and the day before and so on. When the 6 months from 44 days ago is up, we will disappear off their list of linked blogs.

God is pretend has a scrolling blogroll. Maybe that’s why our blog – which shot itself in the listing foot by starting with a letter as close as dammit to the end of the alphabet – doesn’t appear to be linked to from here. But, wait, God is pretend has only 3 inbound links and Whydontyou doesnt appear in the three. Maybe that’s because they are using a script.

We get lots of links from visitors to Gratuitous common sense and I can see us quite clearly on their blogroll, on the index page, not below the jump etc. Ahha. Technorati thinks this has links from whydontyou, but dates them as 35 and 50 days ago…..

I am getting bored with this. You get the picture. The only links that keep getting consistently
updated are from Parabiodox (ffs :-D) and content-scrapers. Any ideas?

10 thoughts on “Technorati links mystery

  1. the blogroll is script driven, everywhere. if someone is not getting an inbound link “from” us the problem is how technocrap reads our site.

    the main thing i could suggest is coming up with a way to display the blogroll in a static format, as i doubt the length or style of a page matters. alternatively, getting everyone on the blogroll to make static links would be a winner…

  2. Hi,

    I have exactly the same issue as you. It seems to have started when the atheist blogroll borked out for a while. COuld it be that this is the problem, rather than technorati?

    I’ll ask Mojoey, eh?

  3. I may be wrong about this, but I believe Technorati only counts a link once, and only counts it for 180 days. So, blogrolls stop being effective (for Technorati) 6 months after a blog is added to it… except when someone adds the blogroll to their blog themselves.

    Linking to a blog on a new post does “reset” the timer, so that your blog counts as linking to the other for 180 more days.

    In other words: blog A joins a blogroll. On Technorati, he “gets” a new link from any of the older members. After 6 months, Technorati “forgets” about those links. But if blog B joins the blogroll ands adds it to his site, Technorati counts a new link (from blog B) to blog A.

    Again, this is my understanding, but I could be completely wrong.

    P.S. – mind if I mention my Planet Atheism Technorati ranks table? 😉

  4. glad you mentioned the ranks table! 🙂

    Unless technorati have changed things, i’m not convinced they only index once. When this blog first crawled its sorry ass onto the blogroll we got multiple hits from the same person. Also, planet atheism shows up each time we get linked….

  5. also, planet atheism shows up each time we get linked…

    From my understanding (and, again, I could be completely wrong, and probably am), PA shows up each time you get linked (that is, have a post in the front page of PA) because that’s a new link (unlike one in a blogroll). But I don’t think it increases your Technorati authority; it simply resets the 180 days counter back to zero.

    In other words, having a blog link 100 times to you doesn’t count “more”, but if those 100 links are distributed through time (say, one per day), then it counts for a longer time (since each new link resets the counter for links from that blog — and PA counts as a blog, here.

  6. Thanks for the comments.
    Pedro, Fair points but complete newcomers to the Blogroll don’t seem to count as links here either nor does featuring on our post of the Blogroll count as links to them.( e.g God is Pretend was listed with 3 linked blogs that didn’t include us, although i could see them on our page)
    And my point was that Technorati doesn’t reset the counter.
    I wasn’t very clear in explaining this. On my understanding of the old rules, a link on the blogroll doesn’t count for authority after the first one, but still gets showm on the “blogs that link here” page, thus extending the 6 months period to start from that date.
    (The new counter is 6 months. In about 130 days, I suspect that everyone’s Blogroll links will vanish.)

  7. Blast. I must have explained this so badly. I dont dare mention today’s Technorati nonsense…….
    (a) Parabiodox took my bracketed (ffs) after his name as “snide” when he referred to it in his blog. Sorry, Parabiodox, it was supposed to be ironic that we were getting loads of links from a christian and none from the atheist blogroll. (By the way, I wasn’t complaining that Technorati wasn’t indexing our posts. It is. It’s taking links in our text as links)
    (b) My issues don’t have to do with getting authority off the Blogroll. It is to do with Technorati not seeing the Blogroll, when it’s in the form of a script.
    Whether it’s on our site or anybody else’s, Technorati just doesn’t see any links on it and hasn’t for weeks.

    This is easier to see on sites that are new to the Blogroll. Because they may only have 2 or 3 links and their history only goes back a day or so, you can see that they are only getting links from a couple of sites that have the blogroll hardcoded into the site. They aren’t getting links from us, even though they appear on our site, on the blogroll.
    TW has some solution to do with yet another of the interminable html/xml variants that I’ve forgotten the name of.

  8. Pingback: Why Dont You Blog? » Slight Misunderstanding

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