So news of MyBlogLog possibly departing saddens me, and will affect the web materially.

In many ways the only reason I still have a Yahoo account is MyBlogLog as I still log into their stats daily. The other reason is for Site Explorer and other webmaster tools – I don’t do paid search advertising with Yahoo.

The silly thing is MyBlogLog whilst it has never lived up to it’s promise isn’t in decline among people who actually use the site so much as it has been in decline in the mediasphere.
There might be a reduced number of widgets installed, but that is something hard to measure externally.

Using a comparrison that ignores widget installations such as Alexa clearly shows that in many ways MyBlogLog has been growing – even their search traffic has been pretty stable.

It is important to ignore widgets, as for instance with Compete it throws the numbers off totally giving Technorati some semblance of growth due to advertising widgets. (look at Quantcast for real measured numbers)

At the same time I would ignore Quantcast numbers for MyBlogLog, as they are not Quantified.

The Read Write Web article on the demise of MyBlogLog discusses the possibilities of the MyBlogLog API which has always been very feature rich – Blogcatalog has had one as well, though it probably needs a way to pass data back to a hosting page based on a visitor, and social graph data exposed.

The news doesn’t surprise me, the last post on the MBL Blog was a year ago. The next post is most likely to say they are shuting down.

APIs are important but ultimately you can get most of the demographic and social graph data you need without it as Tim can happily demonstrate.
I am not sure whether Tim ever used the API in anger for his commercial clients, but it had huge possibilities.

From a search context the loss of MyBlogLog will be missed – it was a good source of links from members of your community, and the pages in some ways were more favored than Technorati’s (more pages in primary index) but ultimately MyBlogLog has been infested with spam for years.

For me the biggest mistake by MyBlogLog was their implementation of user generated tagging.

Here is the user generated tag page for this blog – MyBlogLog tag pages have been infested with web vermin for 2 years.

The tag pages were introduced whilst the original founders were with the company.

Update From Yahoo

Yahoo on the YDN Blog have posted an update on the future of MyBlogLog. Nothing decided yet.

Hey YDN team – if you do finally axe MBL, can we get access to Yahoo Web Analytics instead?

I also find it a little strange that the post was on the YDN blog, maybe they forgot the MyBlogLog blog login?

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.

This post covers the more technical changes to Technorati – I have also now posted about the changes to Technorati from a users perspective

1. Since I started advising Blogcatalog a little in private, writing about Technorati, Mybloglog or any other blog directory or search engine in some ways would be like writing about the competition. Celebrating the great things a competitor does would probably be acceptable, whereas writing something negative would be “dissing the competition”
2. This blog has always had in-depth coverage of blog search, blog social networks and blog related SEO, especially in regards to things like the benefits of semantic markup and tagging. Not writing something would leave a huge whole in my content and a disservice to my audience.

My choice is to write something, but understand that some might look on what I write as being a little biased. In my own mind I am a Technorati fan, so hopefully that will temper my reactions to some features.

I need to qualify the title of this post – I have spent countless days over the last 2-3 years studying changes the user interface, plus the internal and external SEO factors of all the large blogging platforms, social networks and search engines. Whilst my email exchanges with Blogcatalog are extremely infrequent, I am constantly monitoring for changes.

Technorati Relaunched Site

I first read about the upcoming Technorati changes on Venture Beat in an interview with Richard Jalichandra 10 days ago, and Richard also made the announcement on his blog.
There is an announcement on the Technorati blog as well – by the date of the post (8th Oct) they might have been almost ready to go live a week ago, but pulled the plug due to a hitch.

Techcrunch have coverage today and Technorati have also received an additional round of funding (well technically an extension of a previous round).

New Technorati Home Page

Technorati Rankings Changed

Technorati have a new ratings system which is based on factors I haven’t worked out yet – I am sure there is a lot of Twitter data in there as people don’t link very often these days in many niches, especially the SEO community (hint)
They are probably also pulling in 3rd party traffic data.

Techcrunch mention:-

Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.”

It will be interesting how ranking tables such as Adage Power 150 or the Top IM Blogs include this data going forward.

Technorati Tag Pages

This is now approaching the nuts and bolts of Technorati

Lets first of all take a look at the tag page for SEO

The first immediate impression is that this is only a single page of results, there is no pagination and there is a comment box at the bottom of the page provided by JS Kit. That has just bumped the JS Kit installed based by several million pages. Technorati last had around 30 million indexed pages, though I am sure that will soon change.

If you look at your Google toolbar, Search Status or other SEO plugin, you might notice a TBPR (Toolbar Page Rank) for this page of 2. You would think with all the millions of times Technorati have no doubt been linked to for this term by people using Technorati as a default tag space (rel=”tag”) that it would be more than that – Google does seem to be discounting those links and has been for some time.

Almost all of the results are around 150 in the new Technorati Authority scale, and there are no recent SEO posts listed such as Powazek slamming SEO in general, and Danny Sullivan responding… twice.
For those wondering, I nofollowed Powazek because I don’t trust the source. Ranking for stuff due to the benefits of WordPress theme publishing really doesn’t count as SEO.

There is a short article at the top of the page from Blog Critics that has some great links for Michael Grey and SEOmoz.

The least obvious factor is that the tag pages no longer seem to be made up of editorially assigned tags from blog publishers, but is based upon a content search and possible relevance based upon keyword density. I suspect technorati are now using something like Sphinx to power their tag pages. They won’t be the first, and I am not saying this is the wrong approach, but it is a significant change that Technorati, effectively the king of rel=”tag” doesn’t really use it much any more.

As evidence there was a listing to this page virtualdownload.net/?p=59834 – it was not specifically tagged SEO, just used the term a lot promoting what seems to be a warez download.

No SEO tag used (click for more)

Technorati Search

If you just type in a search for a particular topic in Technorati now, it defaults to a search of Blogs on the topic, not recent content.

Rankings Based Upon Old technorati Authority?

I have a funny feeling these rankings are based upon the old Technorati scales in some way as can be seen in the numbers on the left hand side – it is not exactly the same, but there is a lot of similarity in the results.

The default blog post search again seems to to be keyword density based, so if you want to rank for SEO on Technorati, just mention SEO a lot.

If you then refine your search based upon high authority, the results actually seem pretty good, lots of web designers saying SEO is a load of crock, plus Danny defending SEO.

Then you delve into the results and discover:-

• Just a snippet from the lead developer of Tumblr – a crap result
• A paid post on Venture Beat that doesn’t use nofollows – a smart SEO company would actually want those links nofollowed, so I don’t feel like I am snitching.
• Regurgitated Powazek
• More regurgitated Powazek on Boing Boing

I don’t trust those results either, all nofollowed

What is wrong with SEO is search engine reliance on website authority to give meanings to results – these results are in my opinion crap, but search engines have to somehow unravel how bad quality all those referring sites are, as they are not topical authorities and just joining in on a web designer circle jerk. It will take a little time for Google to work that out, and I doubt the “fresh” result for Derek’s post will remain long on the front page of Google.

It should be noted that a large chunk of Derek Powazek’s “good code” has probably just been scrapped by Technorati.

I think the new Technorati shows some promise in its scaled down capacity – it is pretty and fairly functional though a number of the new components need a little work. I hope a chunk of Technorati’s new funding will be invested in hiring an SEO expert.

Disclaimer: I am not an SEO consultant – you can’t hire me on an hourly rate and those I advise almost always benefited from free advise long before there was any kind material compensation. I just study things intensely and rip them apart. I certainly couldn’t create many of the great web applications I write about without a lot of help from great web developers.

Technorati Email Flagged In Gmail As Phishing

Why?

Well possible reasons could be that they use PHP List from their own servers, and the SPF records could do with a little work, plus no indication of things like feedback loops etc. I am not an email deliverability expert.

Delivered-To: list.andy@gmail.com
Received: by 10.211.202.19 with SMTP id e19cs5391ebq;
Wed, 9 Sep 2009 20:57:04 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.114.163.5 with SMTP id l5mr1847786wae.140.1252555022884;
Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from mail01.technorati.com (fw01-620.technorati.com [208.66.65.12])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 13si3719602pxi.23.2009.09.09.20.57.02;
Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 208.66.65.12 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of noreply@blogcritics.org) client-ip=208.66.65.12;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 208.66.65.12 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of noreply@blogcritics.org) smtp.mail=noreply@blogcritics.org
Received: from bcweb03.blogcritics.org (bcweb03.technorati.com [10.12.113.122])
by mail01.technorati.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2BC3219BCE9
for ; Wed, 9 Sep 2009 20:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by bcweb03.blogcritics.org (Postfix, from userid 503)
id 2192416C116; Wed, 9 Sep 2009 20:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
To: list.andy@gmail.com
Subject: State of the Blogosphere Survey/Changes to Your Technorati Authority
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 20:57:02 -0700
From: No Reply
Message-ID: <1484669ea94992dffb014142837dd930@blogcritics.org>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.73]
X-Mailer: PHPlist v2.10.2
X-MessageID: 261
X-ListMember: list.andy@gmail.com
Precedence: bulk

However you could easily blame this all on Gmail as here are a bunch of other legitimate emails I pulled out of spam during the same session.

Emails That Headers Could Possibly Be Improved

Comment subscriptions from Copyblogger

Comment subscriptions from Disqus

Emails With Good SPF

Google’s own Google Groups emails (Note: I don’t open those very often that could negatively affect delivery)

A change in Plaxo Terms of Service… I wouldn’t have known about

Forum updates from one of my hosts, VPS.net

Dr Mike Woo Ming isn’t phishing… that I know of, and all the links in this email seem legit… and his headers seem to be in order from my layman perspective.

Technorati’s solution would be to use an email service provider who has good delivery. One suitable option might be Getresponse’s “Deda” Service.

That isn’t an affiliate link (no deep linking support) but who knows, if you mention my blog post maybe they will allocate a sale to me.

That being said, no email service provider’s emails are immune.

Seth Godin using Feedblitz

Jason Potash using Prosender / Aweber whitelabel

Matt Trainer using iContact

Trey Smith & Frank Kern using Infusionsoft

Delivery for people using their own scripts isn’t fairing any better, in most cases much worse.

For email service providers, my unique key whitelisting system would work, and guarantee flawless delivery.

It is a significant step, though not as many seem to think unusual.

Afterall, Google started as a search engine, then monetized search, and finally introduced their own publisher program Adsense.

Lots of discussion related to the often reappearing Microsoft Yahoo deal mention that display advertising is highly lucrative, and Technorati are in a prime position to serve advertising to a very specific demographic of publishers – bloggers.

Technorati know exacty what bloggers are talking about on a day to day basis, so in aggregate they can offer publishers targeted display advertising, at least in theory.

Also it is important to understand that instead of selling the vast amount of data they have, they are using it to provide an added value service.

From the official announcement:-

Our first step was a private beta. We assembled a core of like-minded sites, founded to provide community and services to bloggers and to surface the best of blog content to consumers, and were successful in attracting advertisers to the network including: T-Mobile, Toyota, and Verizon.

These sites form the base of the Technorati network’s vertical content channels and reach an audience of 17 million (with that audience increasing very shortly with several other sites about to sign). Over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals. Here’s some of who’s in so far:

• blogtalkradio
• Blogcritics
• blogcatalog
• BlogTV
• GeekAlerts
• GPSMagazine
• NerdApproved
• Technabob

The site itself is a little short on real information, so I thought I would try to pry some out of Tony Berkman from Blogcatalog. I was aware of some of the details at the beginning of March, but it has taken far longer than I expected for the news to finally emerge.

Andy: Hi Tony, thanks for taking the time to respond to my request to chat about the new Technorati Advertsing platform. Whilst I knew you had a deal with Technorati some time ago, it was felt best not to discuss it in detail.

Tony: My pleasure Andy

Andy: When did Technorati first approach you about their new advertising platform?

Tony: Around the beginning of January was when we started discussions. They started running ads on BC in February.

Andy: Up until that time Blogcatalog was primarily monetized using Google Adsense. Did you find Adsense was providing enough income to meet your growing development and hosting needs?

Tony: Exactly. AdSense was our primary income source. We do have a number of other sources such as premium membership and directory category sponsorships. For the first year of operation AdSense and these other sources of income enabled us to pay for hosting and developer costs. Around November 2007, BlogCatalog’s traffic exploded and bandwidth costs started to eat into the portion of income that we were using to fund development. At that point I started looking for ways to monetize the site that wouldn’t ruin the user experience.

Andy: So you decided to test Technorati Advertising?

Tony: Exactly. We entered into a relatively short term agreement so that we can see if it is beneficial and whether they can deliver on their promises. The contract term expires in November. It is really too soon to say whether we will continue after that time, but we will give them the chance to prove they can deliver.

Andy: When did you start displaying Technorati Advertising on Blogcatalog, and does it appear in all sections of the site?

Tony: We always want to avoid obtrusive advertising for our members, thus we currently display light advertising in the following sections

1. Directory Categories
2. Search Pages
3. Blog Detail Pages

And if you are a premium member, which costs $6 a month, all ads are removed from the site.

Andy: Can you elaborate a little on their performance?

Tony: The first few months were nothing to write home about as the Technorati team was getting their infrastructure together. During this time we were only displaying one vertical ad on each directory page. Recently though we have seen a move to higher paying ads that are more targeted to our audience – a win / win situation for both advertisier and publisher.

Andy: Whilst Blogcatalog gains very little mainstream coverage, it is quite a high traffic mainstream internet site with over 4M monthly pageviews. I assume that means Technorati are giving you a fairly decent deal?

Tony: We have a favorable split. Mainstream coverage is rather limited, however we certainly get a fair share of internet traffic. Traffic – BC is now closer to 9M pageviews though not all of those views are available to Technorati. For now, provided they continue to improve their offerings, Technorati is a great deal for us, and makes sense as we are able to monetize the directory withouth having to build up a sales infrastructure.

Andy: No yardsticks? Ah well… the other important aspect for any publisher is communication. Do they respond to emails?

Tony: Personally they are outstanding to work with. Their support has been first class. Though at the end of the day it comes down to whether it makes sense to have them representing our ad units, or whether it makes more sense for us to hire an ad team. There is always a balancing act and a desire to concentrate on core competence.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, it is good to have some direct feedback from someone who has already been using Technorati’s new advertising platform for some time.

My Take

At this time I don’t intend running display ads (on this blog anyway) unless it is in the form of some specific sponsorship, though it might be more interesting for some niche sites.

Display advertising is much more suited to more mainstream sites with broader topics.

On the advertising purchase page for Technorati I also noticed the following:-

You can also enquire about Technorati Conversational Marketing, the next step in entering the global conversation on the web.

That could be PR service targeting bloggers, or maybe something akin to Social Spark.

Disclaimer – I do a little consulting with Blogcatalog

Don’t forget to:-

1. Sign up and use Twitter
2. Sign up and use Friendfeed
3. Add both to Technorati
4. Ping both
5. Ping your friends

Interesting charts

True Rumours (rumors)

Update

It looks like Technorati have currently hit the Friendfeed aspect of this with a nerf bat – this means that any comments on Friendfeed are now going into a Technorati black hole. It was working late last week when I first drafted this post and discussed it with a few friends on Skype.

I would even extend that to buying any form of paid link or sponsored review, and possibly also links from directories, social networks, blog commenting etc.

Last June I provided a very simple guide to avoid being banned from Technorati but the same principle applies to many forms of viral marketing where you lose control of the content once it is introduced into the wild.

You need to be using tracking links, redirects, subdomains or even registering domain for the special purpose of ensuring that you have full control of where a user ends up when they click a link, whether it is next week, next month, or next year.

The same applies for search engines.

If you use links pointing to the root of your primary domain

• You can’t remove those links if you get hit with a penalty
• You can’t accurately track traffic from those links
• You can’t split test different landing pages for that traffic source
• If you decide to split your assets, or even sell part of them, you might need to change landing pages, even pointing them to a different domain.

It is easy to claim that Technorati should fix their algorithms to discount themes and blogroll links, or that Google should come clean about exactly what they allow with viral linkbait, but a lot of control lies in the hands of the creator of the viral linkbait, if they are smart enough to use it.

Go to your account on Technorati, and use the URL for your personal lifestream on FriendFeed to start the claim process.

http://friendfeed.com/andybeard

What you now need to do is be able to get a typical Technorati claim code to appear within your feed on FriendFeed

<a href="http://technorati.com/people/technorati/AndyBeard" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

The 2 easy ways to do this are:-

• Twitter the code – it is short enough so that the URL doesn’t get changed to a TinyURL
• Leave the code as a comment within FriendFeed

There are other possibilities such as including it as a description in Delicious, as that appears as comments to a link, and in the near future the same may be true of Stumbleupon – I haven’t tried with other bookmarking tools.

Why Add FriendFeed

• It is a feed and you own it – it is one way for other people to discover it
• It might provide some links either for you or the content you share in various services, through other 3rd party aggregators
• It might contain some totally original content in the form of comments
• If you want comments to get indexed on Technorati, one way they might determine spam is whether a feed is registered
• Technorati have one of the best implementations of microformats, that can be used by the Google Social Graph API, and that ignores nofollow, thus it could be looked on as important to link your profiles together both for discovery, and possibly for any ranking benefit in the future.

I have done the same with things like my Twitter, coComment, Clipmarks, Gooruze and Stumbleupon accounts – I have a few more I should probably claim as well.

FriendFeed OPML & FOAF

Revealed earlier tonight was how to get and OPML list of services and a FOAF list of people associated with a FriendFeed account.

This my services would be:-

http://friendfeed.com/andybeard?output=opml

My Friends on FeedFriend would be

http://friendfeed.com/andybeard/subscriptions?output=foaf

If you plug those into some recursive PHP, you can extract some fairly useful data even without an API

Here are some of my previous articles on the topic, which provide a good background

In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent
Google Blog Search | How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words! (or not)
Exclusive: Google Blog Search Extended Results | Supplemental Results

Google Blog Search

I grabbed some snapshots to demonstrate how things are currently shaping up on Google Blog Search based upon 2 very similar search terms.

Microsoft Yahoo

After five hours – Search for Microsoft Yahoo

After 19 hours

Yahoo Microsoft

After five hours – Search for Yahoo Microsoft

After 19 hours

• Keywords within the title still seem to be the primary ranking factor
• Keyword order in the title makes a significant difference
• Within the content, keyword proximity, keyword density and keyword order appear to make a difference, especially on less used combinations.
• Site authority metrics, such as PageRank, Feed Subscriber numbers, links, etc seem to play an almost insignificant role, other than possibly as a way to filter out spam
• Freshness when sorting by relevance seems to be marginal – once you have been selected as relevant, it seems you remain relevant, with relevance being recalculated periodically (hourly?)
• Tagging (rel=”tag”) may or may not be a factor – it may just add more keywords together in close proximity
• Social media bookmarking and links don’t seem to be important
• Extended results based upon the search phrase to suggest topical authority don’t seem to be a large factor

It is nice to be looked on by Google Blog Search to be more relevant than the New York Times, though it is difficult to determine why.

From a casual end user perspective, the search results were relevant and fresh – for someone looking to research a story for a blog post, they might have to use additional filters based upon time (within the last 24 hours), and maybe also sort the results by date.

Technorati Blog Search

Technorati is currently, without doubt providing fresher results than Google – refreshing a Google blog search page tracking results sorted by date was providing 10 results in the last 2 hours.
In contrast, Technorati is providing 10 results… in the last 10 minutes… and they are not spam.

Some spam can make its way into both Technorati and Google Blog Search results, Technorati’s way of filtering those out, rather than ranking based upon relevance to a search term, is to remove results based on a particular user defined authority threshold, which even “with a lot of authority” lets most established blogs through (as long as they haven’t been banned)

One thing I can’t quite work out with Technorati is why blog posts aren’t quite displayed in precise date order – sometimes a post from 20 minutes ago appears fresher than one from 10 minutes ago – it is possible that the dates are based upon when they were published, but they are displayed in the order thy were collected.

Technorati used to have a major problem with duplicate results from the same domain appearing in their search index, that appears to have been fixed.

There is no way to “rank higher” on Technorati – you are either relevant to a search or you aren’t – the primary search method is full text – I would look on tagging as more important to appear on tag based feed syndication.

Google Blog Search vs Technorati

By nature I am an inclusionist, and I feel that any voice on the blogosphere should be heard if they have something valuable to say. Google’s apparent poor indexing for me is a huge negative factor.

Google’s relevance in blog search seems to be heavily influenced by what in the old days would be looked on as keyword stuffing.

Technorati doesn’t really attempt to classify content as being more relevant, other than authroity requirements – you can select between the keywords appearing as tags, or within the text – there is no over reliance on Titles to prove that something really is relevant.

Even on a relatively hot topic, neither service is sending me a lot of traffic – the total so far is less than 20 visits… combined.

Techmeme

Lets look at what Techmeme doesn’t do

• Doesn’t include all sources
• No search function – I would love a database based search in reverse chronological order
• No snippets for all headlines, just the lead story – maybe this could be fixed with a mouseover and some Ajax

What Techmeme does well is provide a good overview of a breaking story, and as such it also delivers more traffic – more people find it useful.

If I read about a technology based story in a feed reader or on a social news site, I am more likely to turn to Techmeme than Technorati or Blogsearch.

Whilst Technorati has recently swithced to a more “meme like” front page, it still doesn’t provide me with the width of opinion I am looking for, and as it happens when I first started researching this post, the updates to the Microsoft / Yahoo deal were not listed as a technology news story on Technorati.

Google Universal

It is true that Google are slowly integrating blogsearch or blog results in their primary index, but certainly for breaking news on this topic Google Universal Search provided more of a historical reference.

Where Do I Go Second?

It used to be Google Blog Search, because Technorai had very noisy duplicate results.

I am now switching back to Technorati – I love being able to rank well on Google Blogsearch, but the criteria for ranking doesn’t currently provide more relevant results.

Technorati provides fresher results from a wider selection of blogs – chalk one up for the little guy

3 years ago Google introduced rel=”nofollow”, very similar to rel=”me” , rel=”friend” and other XFN and FOAF standards.
Today Google are championing their new API with the slogan “URLs Are People Too”

3 years ago that was true, now URLs on many (most) places where people congregate on the web are no longer “people” because in a supposed attempt to combat comment spam, Google encouraged major sites to use rel=”nofollow” making the links null and void.

I did some initial testing with the example tools Google provides, and the results were less than encouraging, because lots of the data they probably need has nofollow links. There is data out there that is usable, but maybe I need to give Google more help.

Fairly poor results considering how interconnected I am.

People who have better results have them primarily for 2 reasons

1. They gave Google a lot more data to work with on the form – I only gave this blog URL
2. They have extensive blogroll links to their social media profiles, and use a blogging platform that uses XFN extensively (as Jordan demonstrated on Marketing Pilgrim)

The Google system currently doesn’t seem to make good use of dispersed information, even when it can be used because there isn’t nofollow, and it includes rel=”me”

As an example take a look at my MyBlogLog profile

If you look at the source code on my MyBlogLog profile, you will notice that it uses rel=”me” on all the profile links, so lets see what happens if we use my MyblogLog profile as the source.

Lots more results – but they certainly didn’t pick up all my associations from my Technorati profile as I would expect to see a few more of my public blogs, and Twitter.

Lets see what happens if I just use my Stumbleupon profile, which is connected from both my Technorati profile and my MyBlogLog profile.

Here is a direct link to the search with the API

Just one Degree of Separation

Google currently is taking data you give it, and finding profiles it can associate with that data, but they don’t then extrapolate out to further connections. With the Stumbleupon test they did find my MyBlogLog profile, but then didn’t use the extensive data on that page to find more results.
To use the API extensively, it will be necessary to perform multiple recursive calls to find useful data, and some connections won’t be found because some of the hops won’t have rel=”me” associations.

It is interesting to note that they are picking up Technorati claim code in some of the searches, rather than actual profiles that link to the pages in reverse in many instances.
Nofollow is probably why they could pick up my MyBlogLog profile from Stumbleupon data, but couldn’t find it declared in Technorati.

Ultimate Proof That Nofollow Kills This Dead?

The most marked up pages regarding XFN and Microformats that I know of are Technorati, who have been champions of microformats for as long as I can remember.

Almost every single link on my Technorati page has some form of microformat data, but the page also has meta index nofollow in the header.

Now take a look at a very empty page when you use your technorati profile as your source data.

Google Scraper API

Ultimately this isn’t far removed from simple scraping scripts easily created by your average Blackhat SEO, or an averge PHP programmer familiar with using CURL and regular expressions.

Such a programmer could easily create something similar in a couple of days, though it would probably be much easier using Yahoo search results rather than Google’s – Yahoo have an Open API and report links whether they have follow or not.

In fact it is quite likely that such a 3rd party tool would give you much better results than Google currently provide.

Currently I don’t intend to help Google by providing them with more direct links to my social profiles with specific XFN – it can help with reputation management, but at the same time that would push all the great things readers have said about me further down the SERP. That isn’t necessarily an advantage.

I would also be interested if data starts showing up which could only be derived from links that are nofollowed which has numerous SEO implications if the data ever makes it into Google’s main search algorithms.

I would be more excited if Google announced support for additional XFN alternatives (maybe extended from XPN proposals), as an alternative to using nofollow, although the majority of people wouldn’t use them – I am sure paid review services would encourage support.

Currently Google shouldn’t be winning any prizes for this one, why is everyone talking about it?

Update

In this article I linked through to my Technorati profile. Technorati extensively uses meta nofollow, thus Technorati profile pages are not being naturally indexed – you have to link through to them for Google to index them, and whilst I have linked through to various aspects of my technorati profiles in the past, such as the opml of my favorites, I hadn’t linked through to my specific profile.
Since this article was published, Google has indexed it, followed the links, and indexed my Technorati profile as well – the cache data for my profile page is 2nd February.
If you now check my connections using Technorati as a source, you get a massive amount of data from multiple services.