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.

It updates live, in a similar way to Truemors.com and various widgets such as the one for Netscape.com

Topics are split between Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life and apparently blogs have been selected based upon Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

In theory some of my content might appear within both the Technology and Business sections, but that remains to be seen.

Is Technorati Topics Useful?

In theory it is spam free but it is also elitist, though the bar hasn’t been set insanely high for entry. I suppose it might bring additional readers to sites who wouldn’t otherwise get noticed.
I have seen one blog with an authority of 65 appearing in the results already.

Technorati Bugs Fixed?

The Technorati Popular page is fairly broken

Apparently Guy Kawasaki has a twin, in fact he is not the only one…

I actually took these screen shots a week ago, and nothing has really changed

Automattic is now a top rated blog… huh?

Lets have a look at the quality of the posts in the feed on the Automattic blog

There are other discrepancies too, but it is really not my place to snitch on anyone. Technorati are allowed to interpret and hand edit the results just as much or maybe more than Google are, especially as they don’t have a monopoly and 10,000+ employees.

The errors I have pointed out here are the most obvious ones.

I did check to see if they have fixed the Technorati favorites for those with more than 200 – they haven’t so I can’t add or remove any.

Important Milestone For Technorati

Recently Technorati have had quite a few shake ups, with Dave Sifry dropping his CEO role (but remaining Chairman) and 8 people were also let go.
Prior to that in July Adam Hertz, Tantek Celik and Liz Dunn left whilst hiring promoting Dorion Carroll.
Corrected – see comment by Dorion in comments

By my reckoning, Technorati probably still have around 40 staff and have still to show how they are going to integrate Personal Bee which they previously acquired.

Hopefully we will start to see either existing systems fixed, or more ways we can interact and explore our favorite blogs, and make use of what is still one of the best implementations of OPML.

I think one of the problems was that Technorati created some great features that no one was really using extensively for managing OPML in interesting ways, and then with various methods of exchanging Technorati favorites, and my suggestion to import opml into Technorati favorites, the system might have become slightly overwhelmed.

If a legitimate blogger like Robert Scoble can read 100s or even 1000s of blogs, then importing 1000 blogs as favorites into Technorati shouldn’t be looked on as a bad thing, which is why I suggested doing that in the first place rather than wasting a huge amount of time running around between blogs requesting to exchange Technorati Favorites.

Over the last couple of days the Technorati Favorites and WTF were taken offline for maintenance and now there is a new message displayed.

My Favorites
We know you have a lot of favorites, we apologize that we aren’t able to show them.

There is a known bug where the favorites feature is disabled for accounts with a large number of favorites. We are currently working on this and hope to have this resolved within the next few weeks. In the meantime, you should still be able to view your tagged favorites. Please note that your favorites are not lost. They just cannot be displayed. Thus, when the fix is in place, you should be able to access your favorites again. Thanks for your patience!

It should be remembered that Technorati purchased PersonalBee back in April, and nothing currently has been done with integration.

There is no mention of what changes might be taking place, but hopefully Technorati will continue to expand the way that OPML data can be used to customize your browsing experience.

I still use the meme based upon my Technorati favorites on Megite which covers stories from over 800 blogs most of which would never appear on Techmeme.

Unfortuantely with Technorati favorites in the current state, I am not in a position to include more people in it, though as soon as they fix their Technorati favorites, I will be adding people just by reciprocating Technorati favorites.

There was previously a bit of a blogstorm over this, I am sure when the Technorati favorites system is fixed there will be another one.

OPML is meant to be used, and not just by geeks.

That is gaming the system purely for their own benefit.

They might also frequently suggest you Digg their content, or add them to your bookmarks, or we could also add to that list “Add Me To Your Technorati Favorites”, or “Subscribe to my feed”.

What Benefit Do You Get
From Taking That Action?

• Digg – You get very little benefit at all for taking that action, because most A-list bloggers really aren’t interested in reciprocating the favor – if you do it enough to get noticed, you might gain the occasional link which can help you gain readers
• Other Bookmarking – Again, don’t expect any reciprocity even if you write a good post
• Technorati Favorites – The A-Listers in general can’t see any value in the Technorati Favorite System, haven’t reviewed it in depth, and don’t use it extensively themselves, yet they frequently ask you to favorite them
• Subscribing To Feeds – Subscribe to their feed and you are guaranteed success – I am sure many bloggers only subscribe to the blogs of A-listers, because they are the only blogs they can trust to get the best information. The information might be good, but that isn’t going to bring you blogging success

I need to be very clear about a few things

• I still read A-list blogs (in my feed reader)
• I still link to A-list blogs
• I still Digg and bookmark posts from A-list blogs that I think are good

Reciprocity and Benefits in Marketing

In internet marketing some of the most powerful tactics are:-

1. Providing valuable information and benefits upfront, and at a later date converting your warm audience
2. Offering an incentive or bonus for taking an action such as joining a mailing list
3. Joint ventures such as free giveaways where lots of people send their traffic to a particular site, and in exchange have a chance to increase the size of their mailing lists and possibly earn some money form one-time offers
4. Polls and questionnaires to help you respond to the needs of your audience

Unless you have something amazingly unique to offer in the way of information, or something potentially extremely profitable, you are not going to have access to people on the top rung of the ladder.

Reciprocity and Benefits in Blogging

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz often refers to the “Linkerati”, which are those people who can provide links to your site, thus giving your content and overall site lots of Google Juice, to help you rise in the search engines, and also give you some traffic to maybe increase your audience.
Note:I am linking to Rand/SEOmoz simply because he coined the phrase, not because I ever expect Rand to link to me

As a blogger, I am going to suggest that you forget about A-list linkerati, and concentrate as much attention as you can on B-list linkerati and your own readers.

Target your content to your readers or the ones you potentially want to gain, because they are the ones who need to benefit from your content. Don’t alienate your core readership by watering down your content to please the A-list.

Over time, as your core readership expands, you can become noticed by the A-list linkerati in your own niche, but that connection is more likely to come via a 3rd party blogger or through a social media site.

Addressing The Needs of Your Audience

I have had a few people leave comments in the past that a lot of what I write is a little over their head currently, or that a particular post might be too long.

I made a concious decision 6 months ago not to write many “Top 10 tips” type articles on this blog. The core content isn’t intended to be a beginners guide or introduction to any particular topic, though I am always willing to answer questions in the comments, and lots of people take advantage of my contact form.

One of the things I have learned is that even your most fervent readers will miss posts, or skip them. They will also skip related posts links and avoid taking a look in categories or going tag browsing.

They will quite often suffer in silence.

One of the things I try hard to do is read or visit reader’s blogs. Sometimes it is hard to get too involved with the commenting, so it might end up being a drive by answer, but you can always follow up with further questions by email (and many do). I did however note in my post on blogging productivity that commenting on other people’s blogs is not productive, at least in many ways.
There comes a point where you can spread yourself too thin, and you would be better off answering questions on your own blog and possibly linking through.

But to answer those questions being raised you have to know about the discussions in the first place, and that requires at least trying to read as much as you can in the time allocated.

I recently went into quite some detail about all the methods I am looking at to help me read more of the blogs my readers write – as my subscriber base increases, it is becoming more and more of a problem, I have significantly slowed down my blog posts over the last 2 months due to the time it takes responding to comment threads on other blogs.

Some of that experimentation is coming under fire from many notable bloggers.

A few bloggers have already had a chance to respond to the criticism so I am going to link to them here.

On DoshDosh there is a very in depth post about the motivation in exchanging Technorati Favorites. and covering the potential effect. Maki doesn’t fully agree with the OPML import method I introduced because it isn’t as personal. If you have 1000 blogs being rotated through your Technorati for the next year, there is a good chance you are going to see something of interest on all of them… well maybe, but there are some bugs.

Kevin suggests some A-Listers might have had their feathers ruffled. I need to check out Favorite.me

Elaine goes back to her prom days, and also likes pushing the boundaries a bit. Suddenly a collection of 2000 bloggers can be used for other things.

You could probably pick up links to certain memes and find some really high quality blogs, and then convert the list into a high quality OPML file of blogs on a particular theme.

Gary Lee also related about his own experience in running the Technorati Train. Not quite so in-depth, but for me the most significant part was the conclusion:-

I will continue to use this feature on Technorati and believe that it will continue to give me access and exposure to some sites that I probably will never have found for myself. For those who question the intergrity of this practice, I would just suggest that you first closely take a look at what you have been doing before overly criticizing the marketing practices of your peers.

I also respect the decision of Kieron to only selectively reciprocate.

Technorati Gains From People (ab)Using The Favorite Feature

Engtech has saved me a lot of time, because one of the things I was going to write was desciption of all the geeky things you can do with Technorati Favorites. He has also written about a number of bugs or things that need fixing and I am going to add to that list.

• How hard it is to clean your favorites list – lots and lots of page reloading if you want to delete comments feeds, twitter, search results etc.
• My Favorites should have equal authority – this might seem obvious, but if you have selcted certain blogs as your favorites, you would expect them all to show up someime or other on your front page. This doesn’t happen. The blogs with the least authority are skipped, and you can end up with 4 copies of the same blog post plus comments on your front page, and all the content from other blogs never appearing.
  The same happens in the RSS feeds, and my sidebar syndication unfairly doesn’t include as many blogs as it should.
• Importing OPML – I want to pre-assign tags when I import, thus I could for instance grab a list of 400+ SEO blogs, and import it under an SEO tag immediately. Duplicate entries would just get a new tag
• The Searching of Favorites isn’t giving me any results

Based upon the bugs Engtech has found, and my own experience, it seems to me these features were never really put through their paces before, and certainly not by the people criticising the favorite exchanges (who still ask their readers to favorite without giving a benefit for doing it)

As far as I have seen, no mainstream tech blog has ever actually done an extensive review including the various ways Technorati Favorites can be used.

If They Saw a Value In Reciprocation
Or Using Technorati Favorites
The Detractors Would Be Reciprocating Like Mad

Lets take Twitter as an example:-

This is a screenshot from Twitterholic, where I have highlighted all those accounts that are practicing reciprocation to a large extent, or have invited a massive amount of people as friends in the hope of them being reciprocated.

I grabbed the top 21, just so I could mention Stephen Colbert, not that he is actually doing any reciprocation.

Among the reciprocators are Robert Scoble, John Edwards, Jason Calacanis (though not 100%), Chris Pirillo, and the extremely smart social networking specialist Webtickle added maybe 5000 friends the day he setup a Twitter account.

These are people who want to communicate with others in the blogosphere or Twittersphere and Twitter encourage reciprocation because every time someone adds you as a friend you get an email.

Both Bumpzee and Blogcatalog also send emails notifying about new friends, and I expect both services will add lots of features to take advantage of this

Hang on a minute… MyBlogLog used to also send emails for everyone that friended you automatically, and people complained about that being abused, and I was among them.

What is the difference?

With Twitter it is like an invitation to enter 2 way communication

With Technorati, no emails are sent, and if you friend lots of people maybe using the OPML import you can use that to make your searching more relevant, and for creating useful shared feeds.

With Bumpzee and Blogcatalog I have generally reciprocated a fair amount, because everyone using the service so far has been quality with no spam – both services have blogs being vetted for inclusion, I am not sure how members are vetted these days. Most of the people I recognise as my readers, so of course I am going to reciprocate.

With MyBlogLog, currently there still is little use for having friends other than if you want to allow only certain people access to your contact information on various networks, and to segregate messages between friends and strangers. Hopefully they will start accelerating their development as I saw they are hiring 2 new developers.

Technorati Reciprocal Favoriting

I have always offered benefits for people to add me to their favorites. I reciprocate, because I truely want to read what my readers are writing, and whilst I started off just using the Technorati supplied widgets, I now have a Technorati Favorites RSS feed in my sidebar.

Unlike MyBlogLog Communities, I get to read my Technorati Favorites in a single stream of RSS or on the Technorati site using pagination and I have always had my Technorati Favorites in my Google Reader Account as well.
I can’t guarantee to read every post, but I definately skim them when I have time.

The other thing it guarantees is when I am researching new posts, I get to read what my readers have said about a particular subject, and respond to them, and not the A-Listers.

I do however reject the notion that services that provide an OPML import feature don’t want people to actually use it to import feeds.

Other Ways to Add Incentives

Andy Beal is offering a Wii for favorites, similar to his earlier MyBlogLog efforts.

Jordan seems to have the hots for data, so I am also going to offer some.

During the last month I have had 562 visitors from Technorati

80 of those visits came from the Technorati home page (as in from people who had favorited me)
26 visitors from the Technorati Top100 Favorites Page
51 Visitors for my andybeard.eu page on Technorati

In addition I show my favorites in my sidebar, which shows up as links in Technorati, just link blogroll links – so my favorites all get a nice link from me without losing too much Google Juice to a huge long blogroll.
That link however also gets seen in the WordPress console, so brings in a few visitors. I would attribute at least 50 uniques for that.

Also important, I have probably gained at least 50 subscribers to my RSS or email syndication that I can attribute and quite a few links, though I am also giving out a lot of links.

For an established blog, these numbers would not be looked on as significant.

I have also spent much more time writing about Technorati Favorites than taking part in the exchanges, but as one of my core topics for this blog is blog optimization and blog search, plus various blog social networks, that time invested was worthwhile.

Some Ideas for Technorati, and My Readers

If Technorati provide a way to tag OPML when you import, then users of the service could create packages of their favorite blogs around a certain subject. Other feed reader services have default subscription packages, why not allow Technorati users to create their own with the ability to import them under their own designated tag.

Web Designers
SEO
SEM
Knitting

Proactive Technorati users could then share these OPML distributions

Feed Link Chain?

Yep, another chain starting up, this time with RSS Feeds – seems to be a long list and I couldn’t find any mention on Google Blog Search, so maybe he is starting it.

The problem is with full feeds in your feed reader, there are only a certain number you can read. Sure again it is interesting OPML but there is no way to gauge reciprocation, and the list I have seen gives absolutely no details about the blogs to give an incentive to subscribe to a particular one.
Also why all the manual clicking to add people to a feed reader. Why not just distribute an OPML file if you really want to do it.

It has been mentioned that this will help boost monetization potential, but advertisers aren’t stupid, and nor are TLA / ReviewMe / Sponsored Reviews / TLB / PPP etc

I Am Not As Productive As I Want To Be

This is painfully true, in some ways I am like a tumbleweed blown about by wind in multiple directions, and by what is typical in this day and age on the internet, information overload.
This can be especially worrying when your main source of income is from your internet activities, and you have bills to pay, and have to keep food on the table.

Defining Purpose

Unlike a tumbleweed, I always have an overall strategic goal I wish to reach. Whilst some aspects of this blog evolve over time, in reference to the content, I have defined a specific audience I wish to reach and various topics I wish to discuss, and maybe influence.
Alister Cameron heavily quoted Robert Allen, expressing the difference between goal setting, and having passion and purpose for what you do.

I might lack on the goal setting on a daily basis but I have a passion for what I do, and an overall driving purpose to my endeavours.

Any amount of daily goals you set will rarely outweigh the value in working on something you are passionate about. Reaching daily goals has the effect of a small bomb blast in a quarry, whereas passion is like the act of the sea on a cliff, or the way the rain can erode a mountain.

Criticizing Goals & Passion

Amit Agarwal has been criticising Technorati Favorite exchanges. Hundreds of people set a collective goal and are pursuing it with a passion. That isn’t a small bomb blast, it is a surge of the masses, and A-list bloggers had better get used to it.
He is factually incorrect in his statements, because exchanging Technorati favorites doesn’t affect Google Juice in any way.
If popular bloggers get displaced from the “top favorites list” by people actually utilizing the tools that Technorati spent a lot of time developing, then that is the correct thing to happen.

If Amit was actually using Technorati Favorites for any specific purpose, maybe his arguements would carry some weight, but whilst he encourages people to add him to their favorites, he has only added 8 favorites of his own.

I was exchanging Technorati favorites with my readers for almost 6 months before this “Technorati Exchange Train” gathered steam. Most of the blogs I favorited were being favorited for the very first time, or possibly the second time if they had already favorited themselves.

The Technorati meme is more Z-list than 2000 bloggers, and certainly any links I have created to people taking part have been deliberately one directional without a requirement to link back to me, and every single link was highly relevant.

Also, it is not like any of these ideas about exchanging Technorati Favorites are new. Whilst I was first doing it back in November of last year, SEOmoz was 2 months ahead of me.

Responding to Your Readers Needs

Most A-Listers only respond to their readers when a reader links to them, and pays them lots of compliments.
Even though I disagree with Jason Calacanis on many things, one thing I do respect him for is having the balls to admit how he chooses who he links to. It would be going to far to give me any credit for why he now has some disclosure on his sidebar, but most likely he will at least read this. Vanity Google Alerts are great ;)

But how do you respond to your readers needs when they don’t link to you?

I am just small fry, less than 1000 targeted subscribers, but already my feed reader, at least for me, has outgrown it’s usefulness.
When I only had 100 subscribers, I actually had most of my readers in my Feed Reader, and read every single post they made, plus a load of other feeds, including lots of A-Listers.

Through using various blogging social network tools, such as MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and BlogCatalog I grew my readership. It was important to have content that related to my reader’s needs, so my Feed Reader continued to groan.

Feed Readers Are Not Productive

Unless you restrict your reading habits to a really small segment of the blogging population, or you are a blogging machine like Robert Scoble, a feed reader is only going to give you a small window of what is happening in the blogosphere.

One option is to leverage people like Robert Scoble who share content with Google Reader, but shared content with Google Reader also has it’s pitfalls.

Another alternative is to use meme trackers such as Techmeme or Megite.

The problem is that Techmeme is really only about the top ranking Tech blogs, although they do have sister sites for things like celebrities and politics, and even Megite only has a certain width to their standard coverage.

Custom Meme Trackers

For me the best alternative to information overload are various custom solutions that will allow me to maximise the width of my reading, whilst still being able to focus in a specific topics of interest.

I had hoped that I would be able to do something with MyBlogLog, and I hopefully will in the future, allowing me to not only browse the blogs of my readers, but also the blogs that they find most interesting.

Whilst I am writing this post, I am importing over 800 feeds into Blogrovr that I exported from my Technorati Favorites. Some of those will no doubt be duplicates from what I exported from Google Reader. It is actually causing a few technical problems, but I will be writing about that soon.

I do need to clean my OPML from my Technorati favorites a little, but for me it is actually quite a targeted list of blogs who are either my own readers, or the people who read my reader’s blogs, and are interested in blog promotion.

If you explore Technorati, there are lots of powerful things you can do with favorites. Import OPML, search your favorites, tag your favorites, grab a widget to display your favorites, or if you prefer, an RSS feed of your favorite’s most recent posts.
You can also export your OPML to use with other services. You can even grab an OPML file for a specific tag.
Whilst I recently discussed some of the things that Google Blog Search does better than Technorati, I think it is fair to say that if you want to search a specific group of blogs, Technorati offers a better search solution than building a Google Custom Search Engine, or using a community search solution using Google CSE such as Lijit. That isn’t a failing of Lijit in any way, but of how Google handle supplemental results. 95% of blogs wouldn’t appear in the results.

Megite offer a custom meme tracker, so one of my intentions once I have my Technorati favorites cleaned up is to create a custom Megite Meme based on my favorites. I already use a custom Megite meme for things relating to SEO and Marketing.

I am intrigued by PersonalBee because they have just been acquired by Technorati. How that will be integrated with Technorati and especially Technorati favorites will be fascinating, and might provide the Digg style interface Amit is looking for. It might certainly provide more relevance, which the Technorati link authority currently used in my opinion doesn’t. If you are only interested in what A-listers, blog networks and theme developers write, Technorati’s main search is just your ticket.

I also wrote about Myfeedz a couple of months ago. It didn’t really offer what I was looking for, but for someone after a really casual reading experience it might be the answer.

Bumpzee is providing a great service for custom blog tracking, although ranking is based on votes, and they also recently introduced ranking based on traffic – the most popular content for the day. Whilst I could add 100s of sites to my No Nofollow | Dofollow community, I really want people to take the initiative and sign up themselves.

My Bumpzee community is really for people who want to go beyond memes as a way of interacting with their neighbours, and start interacting with related sites that also happen to share link love.

I should also point out, and I will most likely be writing about this tomorrow, that the most powerful way to interact with a blog that supports dofollow is to link to them with a trackback, not in a meme, but in reaction to interesting related content. All this running around commenting to get a link and patting each other on the back is just silly, and isn’t very productive. Whilst the masses now adopting the “I Follow” movement and the “D-list”might not think I know WTF I am talking about, it took a good 6 months to achieve critical mass.

Comments On Other People’s Blogs Aren’t Productive

One of the things I have grown to realise is that spreading answers to problems out on 100s of blogs might have been necessary to encourage the adoption of dofollow, but it wasn’t very productive. It might have helped build critical mass, but cornerstone content that others can point to is far more useful.
In recent weeks I have actually deleted by Google alerts for terms like “Dofollow”, “Nofollow”, and “no nofollow”.

When I created my list of dofollow & nofollow plugins, I had already been evangelising using dofollow plugins for more than 3 months on this blog, and I had been using them personally for 2 years. There had been some small “storms in the teacup” over those 2 years, but no concentrated effort had made a dent in the use of nofollow on comments, even up until February of this year.
I had converted many of my readers, but there were frequent questions about nofollow on other platforms, or alternative methods of disabling nofollow. I had responded to hundreds of comments and questions relating to the use of dofollow, but that content has very little longevity.

Just an example of longterm commitment, No-Nofollow.com was registered November 3rd 2006
It wasn’t developed, because I was waiting for critical mass, and for certain plugin solutions to become available.

There are constantly questions about how using dofollow affects SEO, and they are real concerns.
Easy answer though from Adam Lasnik:-

On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.

I have covered various ways to improve your internal linking structure for months. I will save linking to it all for a followup post.

The Wheel Has Fallen Off the Dofollow Movement

If you have a car trundling along it can pick up speed gradually and become a mass that is very hard to stop. If a wheel falls off it will keep on racing ahead until it loses momentum and stops, because it is no longer connected to the body that gave it energy in the first place.

The car body grinds to a halt, and maybe if there is a spare wheel, and not too much damage will get going again.

For me, personally, the wheel has fallen off the dofollow movement. The reason being there is no longer an easy trail of information people can follow to the one most important ingredient, information.

I have seen people claiming that adopting dofollow and gaining lots of comments will improve their SEO. People are running around like headless chickens commenting on each others blogs for a temporary boost in traffic and comments, working their way down long lists, and writing the exact same comment on each blog. Sure they might be having some fun doing it, but the links and most of the comments are not providing valuable information.

The links being left are invariably to the root domain, and not to related content. If people were using trackbacks linking between related content, they would be able to pick and choose their anchor text.

I Am A Link Whore

Well that is what my friend Paul thinks, and I always respect his opinion.

The big question lies in how many people were actually using Technorati favorites for any real purpose prior to the current Technorati Favorites chain.
From what I have read, top bloggers have stated that they have never seen much traffic specifically from the Technorati Favorites page. It would be hard to judge, because there is suddenly a lot more attention being drawn to Technorati Favorites.

Lets have a look at how other people are using Technorati Favorites

• David Sifry – Founder of Technorati – 76 Favorites

A good 3rd of his favorites are actually search queries, not even blogs at all, and most of the remainder are technology and marketing blogs, mainly A-listers.
It looks like David is using the service as a Feed Reader rather than a favorite being a vote for a particular blog.

• Robert Scoble – Tech Blogger – 11 Favorites

One of Robert’s favorites is his old URL on WordPress.com, so it looks like he keeps things updated. Robert is a heavy user of Technorati, thus I think this is a significant indication.

• Dave Winer – The Father of RSS and OPML- No Favorites

Maybe Dave just loves all blogs, and playing with raw OPML rather than on Technorati

• Steve Rubel – Marketing Strategist – 28 Favorites
• Michael Arrington – Techcrunch Web 2.0 Supremo – No Favorites
• Jason Calacanis – Linkbaiter – Lover of dogs, and successful media mogul both online and offline – No Favorites

Actually I am not sure whether that is actually Jason’s profile, there seems to be something broken, because although that profile has claimed calacanis.com, calacanis.com is not listed under the profile. The same profile is still listed as claiming Engadget.

• Seth Godin – Marketing Consultant and Author – No Favorites
• Michelle Malkin – Political Blogger – 21 Favorites
• Arianna Huffington – Political Blogger – 37 Blogs
• Richard MacManus – Technology Blogger – 1 Favorite

This is interesting because Alex Iskold and Emre Sokullu have both written about Technorati recently, and in particular about search and Technorati decline, and Alex even suggested people fave RWW in the post.
Alex knows all about Technorati Favorites with the 3 he currently has, 2 of them blogs he writes on, and the other is his own Technorati favorites creating an interesting, never-ending loop.
Emre however has Alex pipped, having 4 Technorati Favorites, 2 being blogs he writes for, plus Techcrunch and GigaOm

I could carry on with this list all night, and I will find very few top bloggers that are actually using the full features of Technorati to improve their blog search results.

I Am Using Technorati Favorites

It seems to me that Technorati Favorites are not being used by the majority of top bloggers, so they could have very little complaint about how anyone else decides to use them.

Technorati Favorites help my productivity, and is an easy way for people to say “Hey I am Here, Listen To Me Too”.

The amount of people I have been favoriting recently has been escalating, through use of Technorati’s OPML import feature.

Features like that are there to be used. I encourage other people to use them as well.

Obviously there is a problem with detecting when other people favorite me, and providing reciprocation that I offer willingly, because I want to see what other people are talking about.
Fortunately Engtech has come up with a solution, which uses Technorati’s API

Here is a nice quote to finish off from Engtech, in response to some negativity to the favorites exchange.

@Ilya: The thing is, the Technorati Favorites doesn’t have any meaning to start with.

The top 100 favorites is a completely arbitrary ranking that Technorati should get rid of. Before these favorite exchanges came a long *very few* people used it or had even heard of it.

Creating Passionate Users, easily one of the best blogs anyone could have read only managed to hit around 190 favorites even with including a link to “add this to Technorati favorites” prominently on every page of their blog for over a year.

All that advertisement for Technorati with what to show for it?

I like how you can use it for creating a custom blog search engine, but other than that or using it as a poor man’s RSS the feature doesn’t *do* or *mean* anything.

If it wasn’t for the attention from the favorite exchange then people *still* wouldn’t be using it.

Lets see what the value is when PersonalBee gets integrated, or people do some cool things with OPML.

I can see nothing wrong with using powerful tools provided by Technorati to help with my online productivity, and especially allowing me to monitor what my readers are talking about, so I can respond to their needs.

DoshDosh has a fair number of Technorati favorites, currently just over 440

Now in Technorati they provide an OPML file of your favorites

Here is mine for instance

http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/AndyBeard?format=opml

Hmm Maki’s would be

http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/kawaiikuma?format=opml

OPML Can Be Imported Into Your Own Technorati Favorites

Hattip to Douglas Karr for this, also via Engtech even though I am subscribed, but I am sure he didn’t think of my evil/lazy/smart intentions. I knew about it, but reading his post clicked some brain cells back into position.

So anyway first stop was to download DoshDosh’s OPML, then import it into my Technorati Favorites.

Here is a quite interesting statistic, of the 400+ favorites I added from Maki, only 46 were already in my favorites.

356 Blogs were new additions, and 26 Technorati told me were not blogs, though they obviously were.

But I already had 276 blogs in my favorites to start with – that isn’t bloggers, but actual blogs. With some people I kindly added multiple blogs to my favorites.

I am not sure whether the maths above works out, but I now have 647 Technorati Favorites.

OPML (Right Click and Save to your HD)

Click This Link To Import To Technorati

Not everyone will hear about this much faster method, so make sure you share this with your readers. I really want to save people lots of time in checking their Technorati Favorites all the time.
Also not everyone will reciprocate a Favorite – that is one of the reasons I have added an RSS feed of my favorites in the sidebar. People get picked up as the occasional link from me, and come visiting, and sometimes add me back – not always but it certainly helps.
There are lots of RSS plugins and widgets, I know they also work well on Blogspot.

It is not something I suggest everyone includes on a professional blog.

Once you get lots of favorites, it is hard work managing them, so this solution for those interested is much much faster.

It is quite possible I have missed a few people out, so make sure you favorite me, and I will post a new list in one week’s time.

Also make sure you subscribe so you can get the update when published.

There is a purpose to this, I needed an OPML file of like minded people to do some additional testing of Blogrovr. An OPML of around 200 sites just wasn’t enough, and I wanted interesting sites on varied topics, not just the search and internet marketing feeds I have in my feedreader.

You can also give Blogrovr a try using my OPML file.

One Problem I Noted

Certainly not everyone who has exchanged favorites with DoshDosh linked through to the original, post, or lots of people are not being indexed correctly by Technorati.

The list below is updated every 30 minutes, and shows the most recent 100 people who linked through to DoshDosh as far as Google are concerned. Technorati did show a lot more, but even then it was certainly 200 – 300 people short, depending on how many duplicate listings were in Technorati.

If you are not in the list below, check how your blog pings are configured, or you may have to start manually pinging using a service like Pingomatic.

!inlineRSS:doshdosh

Memes do help people build up links, but the best way to build up links is to write quality content that other people will link to… like this.

For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.

Considering how much competition I often have for certain search terms which everyone seems to be writing about because of common interest, I must have been doing a number of things right.

Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea a few of days ago broke the news of Google’s Patent Application for Ranking Blog Documents.

SEO Round Table posted a synopsis lifted from the Cre8asite Forums that had been posted by Bill, and seems to be the easiest to understand.

I am going to do a little bit of mix and match here, and inject my own commentary but my interpretation of the patent is actually slightly different to those that I have read so far.

It should be noted I am working my way through the patent itself, and not recompiling the summaries of others.

Relevancy & Quality – Blog | Blogpost

It should first of all be noted that in the patent Google doesn’t differentiate between individual blog posts and whole blogs.

The phrase “blog document,” as used hereinafter, is to be broadly interpreted to include a blog, a blog post, or both a blog and a blog post. It will be appreciated that the techniques described herein are equally applicable to blogs and blog posts.

Later on in the patent, they also mention that feeds are also included within the documents that are compared and rated.

two distinct sets of data are used to determine a score of a blog (or blog post) in response to a search query–the topical relevance of the blog (or blog post) to the terms in the search query and the quality of the blog (or blog post), which is independent of the query terms. The quality of the blog (or blog post) may positively or negatively affect the score of the blog (or blog post)

Relevancy – this applies to the search term, thus Google will analyse the blog page, and they will also in some way determine the relevance to the whole blog.
Quality – this is irrespective of the search term, so think about factors from outside your niche

Google Blog Search – Positive Factors Affecting Search Quality | Relevancy

• Popularity of the blog document

A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called “news readers” or “feed readers”) exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document

This patent was first of all applied for 13th September 2005, with Google Blog Search launched 13 September 2005. At the time they were logically not basing this on numbers available for Google Reader subscribers. The Google Reader blog was launched October 21, 2005 with a post saying they had been up and running for 2 weeks.
Maybe there is a coincidence between the 2 events.

So which data were Google basing this part of their patent on? Some services such as Technorati and Bloglines do provide readership data, as does Feedburner, though most services report readership data as they are collecting new blog posts to a service like Feedburner, who aggregate the statistics.

It seems there might be some value is collecting Technorati favorites (my reciprocation policy might be well worth it) beyond limited bragging rights. Google of course through Google Reader now have access to lots of usage data, so maybe other sources will eventually be phased out.

• Implied popularity of the blog document

This implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Click data from search results, possible from Google Toolbar users.

• Existence of the blog document in blogrolls

The existence of the blog document in blogrolls may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. It will be appreciated that blog documents often contain not only recent entries (i.e., posts), but also “blogrolls,” which are a dense collection of links to external sites (usually other blogs) in which the author/blogger is interested. A blogroll link to a blog document is an indication of popularity of that blog document, so aggregated blogroll links to a blog document can be counted and used to infer magnitude of popularity for the blog document.

Everything I have ever read has suggested that for normal search, blogroll links that are site wide carry diminishing value. Just because it is listed here as part of the calculation does not necessarily mean that everyone should start building up huge blogrolls… well unless they want to game Technorati and have a blog network.

• Existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll

The existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers. Therefore, a high quality blogroll that also links to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Another revelation, links on high quality pages are worth more than links on low quality pages.

Remember that “blog document” can mean both blog page and blog site.

Can blogroll just refer to a list of links on what is identified as a blog. Thus a column of links to related pages might also class as a blogroll, whether in the sidebar or below the content.
Thus a list of links to related documents on the same site could be looked on as a blogroll on a blog document.

Related links plugins are very powerful, especially if you also include them in content that gets syndicated by design, or by sploggers.

• Tagging of the blog document

Tagging of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add “tags” to (i.e., to “categorize”) a blog document. These custom categorizations are an indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog document and determined that one or more categories appropriately describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Well some sites do allow you to tag in a meaningful way, maybe Google uses shared tags from Del.icio.us and other sites, but many of those use nofollow extensively.
It is my own belief that self tagging content heavily with plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior helps a huge amount. I have given lots of examples before, but more recent examples include

toolbar pagerank
google reader feedburner
feedburner google reader
compete toolbar
duplicate content supplemental results

Yes, I am just going down the inbound traffic results looking for likely candidates that rank well in both blog and normal search and aren’t totally obscure. These are subjects that sites in my niche have also talked about, with the keywords in the title, and which you would expect to rank higher than my own content.

This doesn’t just affect blogsearch, Google have been using it for some time with the main results as well.
Here are my observations regarding tagging from back in November, especially how they could relate to LSI calculations.

• References to the blog document by other sources

Wow revelation again, god links are worth having either to pages or blog.

• Pagerank of the blog document

Pagerank is still relevant, who knows for how long and how much.

It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used.

What seems to be missing, at least at time of application?

• Domain age?
• Trustrank?
• Page Titles?
• URLs?
• Growth rate of link popularity

Plus lots more that also factor into it, but general search patents probably also cover blog search.

Google Blog Search – Negative Factors Affecting Search Relevancy | Quality

• Frequency of new posts on the blog document

The frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. Feeds typically include only the most recent posts from a blog document. Spammers often generate new posts in spurts (i.e., many new posts appear within a short time period) or at predictable intervals (one post every 10 minutes, or a post every 3 hours at 32 minutes past the hour). Both behaviors are correlated with malicious intent and can be used to identify possible spammers. Therefore, if the frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document matches a predictable pattern, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Make sure there is some variation when you publish your content for the day, especially with future dated posts.
Most spamming tools are actually fairly sophisticated, thus I am not sure this measurement is very accurate. It most likely indicated a blogger who is very organised these days.

• The content of the posts in the blog document

The content of the posts in the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. A feed typically contains some or all of the content of several posts from a given blog document. The blog document itself also includes the content of the posts. Spammers may put one version of content into a feed to improve their ranking in search results, while putting a different version on their blog document (e.g., links to irrelevant ads). This mismatch (between feed and blog document) can, therefore, be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

This is actually a very significant and interestingly worded item. Google are stating that they are comparing the content of a feed with the content on your pages to ensure it matches.

Based upon this:-

• Don’t use a content spinner on your feeds to avoid duplicate content
• Allow Google to index your feeds
• If you use related links on your blog, make sure you use them in your feeds too
• Duplicate Content, especially in feeds

Also, in some instances, particular content may be duplicated in multiple posts in a blog document, resulting in multiple feeds containing the same content. Such duplication indicates the feed is low quality/spam and, thus, can be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

I can’t say I have noticed a problem having a lot of straggling RSS feeds on categories and tags.
This could also be referring to things like the large footer I have on each post, though I haven’t seen a problem with that either.

After the last toolbar pagerank update I spent some time studying Matt Cutts’ blog, and also looking at how pagerank was being transferred around my own site. Pagerank is only slightly useful as a guide, and only immediately after an update.
Rather than repeat myself, you can read about my organic garden approach to this site.

• Collective Intelligence

The words/phrases used in the posts of a blog document may also be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. For example, from a collection of blog documents and feeds that evaluators rate as spam, a list of words and phrases (bigrams, trigrams, etc.) that appear frequently in spam may be extracted. If a blog document contains a high percentage of words or phrases from the list, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Google invest a lot of research analysing spam, detecting various word matching patterns, and use that to identify other documents.

• A size of the posts in the blog document

The size of the posts in a blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. Many automated post generators create numerous posts of identical or very similar length. As a result, the distribution of post sizes can be used as a reliable measure of spamminess. When a blog document includes numerous posts of identical or very similar length, this may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

This might be of special interest to those that use out-sourcing for articles, you need to ensure the article length changes.

• A link distribution of the blog document

A link distribution of the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

In some ways this debunks the benefits of blogrolls mentioned as a benefit, but as previously quoted, Google are using blog document in multiple context, and comparing the context, thus it could just refer to multiple spam links always pointing to a single domain within the content.

• The presence of ads in the blog document

The presence of ads in the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. If a blog document contains a large number of ads, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Remember this is just a patent, and Google recently relaxed the rules about having ads from other networks along with Adsense. As long as a page is of a reasonable size to support the adverts, I don’t think there is a problem. If you just have a heading and 5 words, with 10 advertising blocks, you might want to add a few more words.

However they go on to say this

Moreover, blog documents typically contain three types of content: the content of recent posts, a blogroll, and blog metadata (e.g., author profile information and/or other information pertinent to the blog document or its author). Ads, if present, typically appear within the blog metadata section or near the blogroll. The presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Thus if you are using blocks in the content for all your ads, you might not rank as well, especially if you use multiple networks. You can probably get away with 3 in the content, or maybe 1 or 2 per post.

• It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used

Conclusion

The feed stats information is very useful, and looking at the timing, my conclusion is that Google might have been using Bloglines and Technorati Favorites data, with Google Reader in its infancy, or maybe though less likely, when blog search was introduced, they weren’t using that part of the patent

For me the most significant information was tagging, but just linking though to Technorati with your tags isn’t a great idea.

Remember that Google have their own blogging system, and they have archives and labels, and they are not going to create a system to generate duplicate content and then penalise you for it. Google wouldn’t have added such a system unless they intended to benefit from the enhanced data.

You don’t have to build your blogs in a 1990s era tree like structure to rank well.

Subscribers and Technorati Favorites may help you rank.