Pinched. More beef. Technorati it going to take is all back.
To dissuade chain posts from submerging your voice in their dilutative effects, we’ve updated our indexing systems on an experimental basis to filter out links of this nature. We all love photo collages of faces; we’ve had them, albeit on a smaller scale, on the Technorati site since last summer. However, “join us and use these links” memes such as 2000 Bloggers is really a disservice to rank measurement systems and thus this decision to change our indexing policies in that regard.
What happens if Google decides it was scammed, too?
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
deviousdiva says:
I am sure most of the 2000 bloggers who signed up (like me) don’t care about their Technorati ranking and didn’t even think how this project would change it. I joined to meet new bloggers (the ones who are not on the A lists and top 100 lists. I am not on any top anything list and I really don’t want to be. That’s not why I blog.
This really feels like a slapdown to the small-fry of the blog world
February 6, 2007 — 8:23 am
Greg Swann says:
> This really feels like a slapdown to the small-fry of the blog world
I’m sorry it feels that way to you. It was link-farming even so. An inbound link is an acknowledgment of the quality of your work. This project was an acknowledgment of your pulse — not quite the same thing.
I don’t want to claim any great prescience. I thought it was cheesy from the start, but I didn’t realize until last Thursday that it was seriously gaming Technorati. I mentioned it to David Gibbons on the phone on Friday, but, even then, I didn’t foresee consequences at Google.
February 6, 2007 — 8:35 am
ellamichelle says:
i’ve written about this at length already today, but technorati’s system makes it difficult to find the smaller non big money blogs due to it’s focus merely on links, so calling them the only measure of worth of content is reductive and a pretty poor yardstick of a blog’s value.
I was looking forawrd to visiting the other participants of the project, because of the fact that the project made it so much easier to find them without having to slog through the top 100 usual susppects.
February 6, 2007 — 8:44 am
REBlogGirl says:
Technorati has a bunch of serious flaws you can exploit to “game” it. This 2000 Bloggers project only exploited one. Another popular exploit is that you can “super submit” your posts by changing that parameters in the url. I hope they will crack down on that one soon too… it totally dilutes the value of some searches.
February 6, 2007 — 8:58 am
Greg Swann says:
> This 2000 Bloggers project only exploited one.
A lot of RE.net webloggers got involved in this one. Will you be writing about it?
February 6, 2007 — 9:04 am
deviousdiva says:
so the fact that I have only about a 100 incoming links (before 2000 bloggers even though my link total didn’t change much) means that my work is of less quality than someone who has 500 links ? I don’t think that is true. I built up my own blog community on a very small niche issue (human rights issues in Greece) by hard work and dedication. I really don’t appreciate people telling me my work is of a lesser quality because of my lower ranking or lack of incoming links.
Tghe people I hang out with in the blogworld have NEVER done anything to deliberately get links. Maybe we are not understanding the way this whole thing works. But I like it better that way.
February 6, 2007 — 9:33 am
Greg Swann says:
Technorati does not measure quality — which cannot be measured objectively. It measures the quantity of other webloggers who have evinced, by linking to you, an opinion of some sort about the quality of your work. It is only a useful measure if those links are presumed to be honest, not the consequence of a link-farming game.
I don’t believe you are as naive as your dudgeon would imply. In any case, your objections to Technorati are noted.
February 6, 2007 — 9:39 am
deviousdiva says:
Well, believe it or not. That’s up to you. It really never crossed my mind. Until now I have never had a link from a blog that I hadn’t visited and commented at. So I know about exchanging links but not about going out and deliberately trying to cultivate them for selfish gains. I feel bad that people like me (and I think that is the majority on 2000 bloggers) are being accused of something that really wasn’t our intention.
I guess the blog rating wars are bigger than I thought. Believe me if you wish.
February 6, 2007 — 10:02 am
Athol Kay says:
I found a couple of the 2000 blogger pages when it was hitting the 500 or so mark. I have cable connection and good grief that page took forever to load. I skipped that nonsense simply because of that.
February 6, 2007 — 10:59 am
Zoli Erdos says:
Devious Diva, no one is accusing you of anything. In fact I believe that for most participants this was “just a fun excercise”, a “let’s discover our blog-neighborhood” game – but I would rather discover them based on contextual search then on their mug-shots.
Many believe that this was all about the social discovery, and people would link to whatever they found interesting. Well, sorry, I don’t see that selective discovery, when the code got published, anyone who copy/pasted it into their blogs automatically linked to 2000 other blogs without ever looking at those blogs. It became a link-generating machine.
But here’s the best part: Technorati did not shut down the 2000 Bloggers initiative. All they did was to exclude it from their index for link-count purposes. You and anyone who likes it can still repost the collage and click to blogs individually. The “discovery” process is intact – the question is how many bloggers would continue, now that the secondary (?) incentive is gone.
We know that Tino, the guy who launched it lost interest – but that should not come as a surprise, is you read this interview, his motives become crystal clear: links and increased traffic to his business site. But that’s only him, you and hundreds of others can continue the social discovery process and even manually link to sites you find and like …
February 6, 2007 — 12:57 pm
Zoli Erdos says:
Oh, I forgot to address this:
“What happens if Google decides it was scammed, too?”
It’s not “if”, only “when”. Google’s algorithm considers a large number of sites with identical contents and reciprocal links a linkfarm and penalizes the sites involved.
February 6, 2007 — 1:01 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Google’s algorithm considers a large number of sites with identical contents and reciprocal links a linkfarm and penalizes the sites involved.
Ouch. My hat’s off to you for your work on this.
February 6, 2007 — 1:05 pm
deviousdiva says:
“Technorati did not shut down the 2000 Bloggers initiative. All they did was to exclude it from their index for link-count purposes”
Good. That’s fine. I am glad they do not have the power yet to close down the whole project. I have found some very interesting people through this and I am continuing to do so. I don’t know about Tino’s motives, I only know my own.
And Google can do what ever it wants. I don’t have anything to lose.
February 6, 2007 — 2:31 pm
REBlogGirl says:
Wow, lively discussion here. As to Google: G Daddy don’t like being played and this to me screams Gray Hat SEO trick. And not too cleverly disguised, I might add. While Google won’t build something like this into it’s algorithm until it reaches epic proportions, mark my word, Google will catch on. So, my advice is just build your links naturally. Steer clear of anything that resembles mirroring or link farming. If you produce good content, you will build backlinks, if you don’t- your blog will sleep with the fishes. And that is the law of natural blog selection. There are no shortcuts – even if 2000 bloggers think otherwise.
February 6, 2007 — 3:40 pm
Michael Price says:
So let me see if I have this straight. I create a place where thousands of people provide me content. I allow those thousands of people to create links back to that content because they have an interest in it even though it’s “cheesy”. Thanks for pointing out how wrong that is. Oh, wait, I just described YouTube.
How do you think Tino was able to find 1999 co-consipirators for his diabolic gray hat plot? I’ll never tell. I was one of the first people to become a part of the master plan. We all said damn the self-proclaimed experts. We flew in the face of the SERP’s, we said damn the SEO torpedos, full speed ahead. We said who’s afraid of the big bad Google. We want the fame and fortune that only Technorati can give us! So, alas our mission is complete, the battle won, but the great war lost. We must now join Davey Jones and the fishes forever.
Sheesh. A tempest in a teapot.
February 6, 2007 — 5:30 pm
jf.sellsius says:
Awesome Michael. A tempest in a teapot indeed.
February 6, 2007 — 6:14 pm
jf.sellsius says:
I’m with deviousdiva when it comes to quality. Technorati links don’t measure it. It is a red herring. Links measure popularity (and maybe linkbaiting skill). Popularity & quality are not one and the same. Boing Boing has 19,352 blog links and is ranked 8 on Technorati. Now I like BB, but I’m not ready to give it the Odysseus Medal of Quality. Are you Greg?
February 6, 2007 — 6:49 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Sheesh. A tempest in a teapot.
I hope that turns out to be the case.
February 7, 2007 — 9:16 am