Technorati says: You’re so five minutes ago

Technorati has changed the way they calculate a blog’s popularity. It is no longer sufficient to be linked to by bloggers. You must be active and popular, but they’ve redefined the meaning of the word “popular.”

For URL search, we’ve been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we’ve made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.

The change affects how Technorati ranks its over 18.5 million blogs. Our new link counts expose more active blogs and rising stars, allowing readers to discover blogs currently receiving the attention of the blogosphere.

So what Technorati is saying is that weblogs that have been around for years, that are still active, that are still read, but are not considered “hot”–have lost links that were previously counted by Technorati. Why? Because not as many people are linking to those bloggers’ individual posts. In other words, you can have hundreds of blogs linking to your weblog every day, but that no longer counts in the Technorati ranking system. That explains why my ranking dropped from 500 to 2900 in one day. Technorati simply discounted 600 links because they are from blog homepages to my weblog–not to recent posts of mine.

Put another way, I have a permanent link in Instapundit‘s sidebar. That link brings me consistent traffic from Glenn’s site every day, but that link is not counted at all under Technorati’s new system. Instead, they’re tracking–well, flash in the pans. From the same Technorati post:

Michael Barnett (interdictor), a blogger who actively covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is an example of an emerging blog of interest in the past few months. Interdictor is currently the 90th most uniquely cited blog tracked by Technorati.

Huh. A guy blogging about Hurricane Katrina during and after Hurricane Katrina was a popular blogger in September. Imagine that. Except there’s a catch: The Interdictor is now yesterday’s news, and his blog stats reflect that. A quick check today shows that he is no longer in the Technorati Top 100. A look at his stats show 2,000-plus links, most of which obviously came in the last couple of months. So who’s reading him now? Interdictor’s recent linkage is 20 links in the last 4 days. Hell, there hasn’t even been a new post on Interdictor since Thursday, which would make him, I think, one of those inactive blogs that Technorati doesn’t want to count in their ranking system.

I’m thinking the new system has a few kinks.

If one of the problems of the old system is that some blogs that are no longer active link to blogs that are still active, then why is Technorati tracking inactive blogs? Why are they not removing inactive blogs from the list instead of removing all blog homepage link–effectively punishing bloggers for having seniority? Is this new system really going to change the way new blogs are treated? I don’t think so.

Sometimes, blogs skyrocket to the top and stay there. We’ve seen more than one example. But more often, blogs that skyrocket to the top because they are the Hot Topic of the Day tend to fizzle out and fall to earth not very long after. But that doesn’t seem to matter. The new system fairly screams “Hot or Not?”:

Technorati determines a blog’s ranking based on the number of links from unique blogs over the last 6 months. If John links to Susie 5 times in 5 months Technorati will count 5 new links to Susie from 1 unique source. Susie’s rank will change based on this 1 new source.

So basically what they’re saying is that they’ll track links to posts, but not sidebar links on a blog’s main page. But isn’t that what a tracking service is supposed to do? Track links?

If Technorati is going to tout itself as a service that tracks links from blogs to blogs, then it should be tracking all the links, not just the ones Technorati thinks are the right ones to track. Established bloggers have more links from homepages? That’s too bad. We earned those links by writing consistently, over time, on weblogs that other bloggers want to link from their homepages.

Having said that, longevity alone does not confer popularity. I started blogging long before Power Line, currently number 17 on the Technorati Top 100. I have never cracked the Technorati 100, and probably never will. Longevity is not a factor in their popularity. Subject matter is the reason people link to Power Line, not the fact that they’ve been around for a while. Subject matter is, ultimately, what blogs are all about. People are going to link to what they want to read, and share those links with their readers. The homepage link is the ultimate method to share subject matter with your blog’s readers. A homepage link tells your readers that you like a certain blogger enough to send traffic his or her way. Technorati, by using this new method, is shredding the merit system of blogging and resorting to the methodology that we might call “Fad of the Day.”

Am I just upset because my blog rank has dropped? Well, I’d sure like my six hundred links back. I have an ego, like most bloggers. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about accuracy in numbers. If six hundred more bloggers are linking to me than Technorati is reporting, then their reporting is flawed.

I don’t think that’s the kind of reputation that a blog tracking service wants.