You didn’t think I would leave it at just my expert perspective on the Technorati changes did you?
As with my previous post I want to make clear that it is somewhat of a dilemma writing about Technorati, as I provide some infrequent consultation to Blogcatalog in some ways one of their competitors.
However as well as providing an expert’s overview of Technorati I have always been an avid user, so this is Technorati from a purely user’s perspective.
Technorati Favorites Are Gone
The Technorati Top 100 by number of favorites has gone, along with all the interfaces for managing and reading favorites.
Technorati Blog Reactions Are Gone
You used to be able to use Technorati to monitor a story, following links to related posts.
Technorati no longer has a page containing a large snippet of your content along with the related links to that content.
As a user of Technorati that is a major loss, and it was this relationship between posts that used to make technorati a core component of the WordPress interface.
This is a feature competition with Google has finally killed, but Google’s Blogsearch currently sucks, picking up comments even with nofollow, sidebar links etc. Monitoring links through Google is time consuming because of the noise.
Technorati Comments
You can now leave friendly comments on the profiles of the blogs you love, all through JS Kit (which means the blog owner has no way to moderate, just link Google Sidewiki)
Here is one I left on the Techcrunch profile pointing this out earlier
Technorati Articles
You can now write full articles to post on Technorati such as this one (chosen at random)
I think you are meant to reach these articles through the Technorati “People” navigation which isn’t currently working, but there are links to related articles at the bottom of Directory pages.
Technorati Directory
Top blogs in a small collection of topics plus the global “headline” Technorati top 1000
Humans are going to have difficulty navigating through more than a few pages, let alone search engines
You are really going to have to use blog based tags to find blogs similar to your own. Make sure you set them correctly for your own blogs.
Overall
Many of the features that were broken no longer exist, and the idea of reactions going away forever is sad. Hopefully it is a feature that will return.
I am not sure whether commenting will enhance the site – I know that contact systems on Mybloglog and Blogcatalog are prone to spam which a site owner can moderate. I can’t understand why they use JS-Kit.
Update
Technorati have now posted a list of changes from their perspective highlighting things like the ranked directories (though they have always had ranked tags)
There are even some slightly more technical features I didn’t spot as missing, but will eventually come back
What’s gone for now?
With six years of history behind us, we have also discovered what’s important and not important in our offerings. As such, some things will go away permanently, and others will return later with enhanced utility that reflects the new features of the site. Here’s what’s coming back shortly after launch:* Technorati Charts and API: both will be returning later
* Widgets – For those sites with widgets on their sites, there’s no need to worry. Some widgets will continue to serve as they have in the past, and some that utilized legacy Technorati technology will either change slightly or temporarily disappear without any affect on web pages. Technorati will be developing some exciting new widgets that match the new features in the site.
* s.technorati.com is still there, but it’s moved to the main site at Technorati.com/search
* Watchlists are gone
* Some (but not all) RSS feeds.
They really should remove the noindex/nofollow from their blog header
Update
It seems Technorati are now crawling a lot fewer blogs now – it will be interested to find out an exact number.
33 Comments
Great blog post. Your overall summary is spot on. I posted this to the Technorati “welcome to our new site” post but I don’t think it conveys how royally ticked off I am about this:
“Redesigning is not a bad thing but you’ve lost the functionality I came here to use. As a digital director my twice weekly visits to Technorati were to track blog mentions about the website I work on. I can’t do that here any more so there is no reason for me to use this site. The alternatives out there simply don’t do what Technorati used to do so you owned the market. Clearly, one of them (Blogpulse hopefully) will step up to the challenge if you guys don’t reinstate your features, as other people have also pointed out. Really disappointed.”
Hi Kay
In some ways I had to temper some of my personal opinions in the same way on the expert article I tempered some of my opinions about their new site structure. I stuck to observations most of which have been ignored by most of the tech circle anyway
That being said I welcome real opinions both positive and negative
Good post illustrated with screenshots!
Thank you!
hmm…not a big fan of technorati’s changes to be honest. I find whenever i add a new blog on there, it will doesn’t do much to my traffic, stumbleupon is way better for this. However, i really wish more of these social bookmarking sites would be dofollow. No follow tags suck big tapoicea balls.
Study Technorati and multiple subdomains
As far as traffic goes I actually prefer EzineArticles to both Technorati and StumbleUpon but of course this varies depending upon niche I guess (probably quite a bit actually).
Outstanding 2-part series. I vented on their blog and a third party complaint site they are funneling us to.
I’m not quite sure if they:
1) Don’t understand the changes they made invalidates the primary use case of Technorati for many people.
–or–
2) They do understand point #1, but it’s an intentional move to turn the site into an original content repository, which monetizes better than a blog catalog and search facility.
If it’s #2, they should have just gone with a more honest approach. I’m not quite sure whether to hang around and wait for them to make improvements, or if it’s time to bail now. Has it already “jumped the shark” ?
Thanks for your interesting article with clear screenshots!
Great share here Andy, I love your post. It’s great having you for backing up bloggers community.
I’m not sure what motivates sites like Technorati and Digg to remove valuable communication tools – I’ve heard it is an effort to try to save bandwidth, but it seems like a mistake to me. Social networks are to socialize, are they not?
Count me as ticked off as well as it has undone hours and weeks of work I had done using Technorati scores as part of a ranking chart for Aussie blogs for writers. without warning.
Or did I miss it? Were people appropriately warned that certain features were being deleted, authority would be forever changed and the vast majority of blogs would be deindexed as unworthy?
For a site that is all about social media, their grasp of communications and listening to an audience seem severely lacking.
No warning other than the article on RWW stating that the timescale would be different, plus they do give you until the end of the month before they switch their API off ;)
There are alternative sources of data – look at the Adage 150 for inspiration.
Somehow, I never liked technorati and all the hype behind it. Blog aggregation services are good to the extend of easily tagging them and searching but not for deciding authority of blogs which was misused by many. Establishing blogs with good content always had a problem with their ranking system :)
New fixture of technorati make me confused to using. I think we must learn must for new fitur of tehnorati. bad is so sad because technorati standar to know how popular we blog. I hope for future technorati be better.
I think Technorati has changed with the time. In Germany there are no search engines for blogs based on Technorati – because Technorati does not list all entries regularly.
I too am a little disappointed with the changes at Technorati. I have always thought they should have a better/more advanced search engine, to locate blogs in their database. The one they have is way to limited and rudimentary. I think if enough people feel unhappy with the new changes, they might listen and change things back? Maybe.
I can´t for the life of me figure out why they would get rid of the Top 100 blogs! I always enjoyed looking through those. Anyone have any idea or know if they have any plans to review the changes they have made recently?
Top 100 is still there but harder to navigate, top 100 favorites disappeared
Interesting post. I have my account on Technorati to promote my blogs, but it seems to drive to few traffic back. I think that are many other better social bookmarking site that drive traffic to you with less work.
You shouldn’t be looking for traffic, you should be looking for readers.
http://www.blogcatalog.com/community/blogcatalog-traffic-readers-and-you/
Prior to all the Technorati changes I published a post about the importance of giving a Technorati fave to your favorite blogs….(let’s face it there top 100 leaves a lot to be desired). A few days after the post I visited the site and was horrified. It’s like a barren wasteland.
I don’t know what their plans are but I don’t think they’ll survive.
I was about to add to my “favorites” a certain blogpost at technorati but I wasn’t able to navigate onto it. I’m sad I lost all of my favorite posts that I still need to re-read.
Thanks for posting by the way.
Love this article, very useful information… As a new what is the important things you need to do in order to have Technorati work for you and have your blog be noticed?
It used to be relatively easy to get other bloggers to link to you without any incentive, it is becoming progressively harder unless you are a “news maker” or somehow start some kind of meme. Lots of Technorati is still based upon links even though they don’t show it… I suppose that stops people picking holes, and allows them to sell reputation monitoring information… others have been leveraging Technorati data for a long time, whilst Technorati wasn’t themselves profitable.
What has happened here?? Put me down as unhappy with these changes.
I believe with their backward progress. Loyal users would eventually run out of reason to revisit them. I mean, to remove unfixed features, to lessen the accessibility of users and to minimize the fun they get from the site, is typically popularity suicide.
I also have a Technorati account. But it didnt bring me much traffic. So, I just dropped it. Anyway, thanks for explaining new Technorati changes… Let me try it again.
If someone visits from Technorati your challenge is to get them to subscribe, because they might visit your site 30+ times in the next year, and may even link to you sending 10s, or even 100s of visitors. Network effects are important, and a visit from Technorati has more potential than a normal search visit, or referred visitor.
I personally don’t understand why social/news/networking websites get upset with webmasters/bloggers about leaving good quality content and backlink…..Isn’t that what all these sites are about….getting recognized by google….If it weren’t for google….many of these so-called awesome websites wouldn’t be around today…..I’m still learning and love reading this blog….
Certainly links are nice, but a lot is about community – “social media” remember
Perhaps this is for the best. I no longer use Technorati and if not because of this post, I won’t know that Technorati is changing so much.
Unhappy loosing my reactions. I used those to keep track of who was linking and made many positive relationships from that. Now, I have no idea who’s linking to me. I am happy with my new ranking though, having jumped from 4 to 118. That hopefully is due to my frequency of posting and valuable content. I’ve been moving up every day since the change, even though they keep indexing more and more blogs. Hopefully quality over quantity wins. Bring back the reactions! Screw bandwidth!
I have never really liked Technorati. Because of the recent changes it’s even harder to navigate it. But thanks for the post and explanations.
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