What’s Wrong With Using Technorati to Rank Blogs?

Abe recently posted about ratified.org, the latest project that ranks Philippine blogs. Abe says ratified uses mostly Technorati rankings, but also factors in Feedburner reader count. Now I’ve been a fan of technorati because of how easily you can have your blog indexed (as opposed to Google, which may take a few days or weeks even). However, I just realized Technorati ranking may not be the best way to determine your blog’s popularity and even worth.

Here’s why.

Technorati ranks sites according to the following metrics: (1) number of inbound links from other blogs; and (2) number of blogs linking.

For instance, ratified.org ranks me at number 27, even higher than Manolo Quezon’s quezon.ph and even Connie Veneracion’s pinoycook.net, and even Bianca Gonzales’ superbianca.blogspot.com (now that got me wondering!).

So let’s say you have ten blogs linking to your site, and each of those blogs have two links to your site each (for instance, one link from the sidebar, and one specific link in one post). Your site gets 20 inbound links, and 10 linking blogs.

Technorati uses the linking blogs metric to rank blogs. So a blog with 11 blogs linking toward it will rank higher than one with 10 linking blogs.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, in terms of legitimate links and blogs. It’s a good metric after all — determining popularity and credibility based on how many people link to (and therefore like) your site.

But imagine this. What if I created a thousand flogs (fake blogs) on a free blogging service like WordPress.com or blogspot.com and what if each of those blogs had a link to my original site? And let’s add in a couple of posts from each of those blogs linking toward my original site.

I could easily get 1,000 inbound blogs and 2,000 to 3,000 inbound links from those blogs.

I’m not sure what kind of algorithm Technorati uses to determine quality. With Google, at least you know blogs have their own “link juice,” meaning a more popular, trustworthy blog linking to your site will give you better chances of ranking high in relevant searches than having a thousand newly created sites/blogs linking to you.

Okay, granted I do have more Feedburner readers than Manolo — maybe this is because I use a Feedburner redirect plugin that redirects all my RSS readers to the Feedburner feed. Or maybe I have more feed readers because my readers are more likely to come from the RSS reading crowd (the techies?). I guess it’s really not that easy to rank sites based on a few simple metrics.

Just wondering out loud.

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