What does Technorati rank really mean?
Lately I had been thinking about my blogging experience of less than a year.
Starting September 2006, I saw the Technorati rank of this blog climb from over a million to within a whisker of 200,000, in a few weeks. Since then it has dropped below 500,000 and isn't holding!
Beginner's luck? Perhaps, because I never did anything to push up the rank, either then or now.
I have, however, been posting steadily. Does it therefore mean that my blog has become less popular with more content?
Well, there are more subscribers and casual visitors now, but their numbers being embarrassingly small, I can't make any definitive claims.
Technorati ranking system is flawed in many ways. For example, it fails to count lots of links. Yet is a good indicator because it presumably miscounts for everyone, so the ranks are fair.
However, there'd be a strong incentive to game any such system, and bloggers do seeks links using every conceivable trick. Is that good or bad?
I think it's wonderful because it forces all of us to think about meaning of rank, the best way to measure it and newer ways to exploit the system. In the ecosystem that is the blogosphere, blogs and ranking systems, thus compete with each other and evolve.
There can be no better way forward!
Today I came across an experiment on Dosh Dosh's website, whose result would be very interesting to watch:
Technorati link count rankings are a source of social prestige in the blogosphere and are often the pride or despair of many bloggers. Unlike Technorati Top 100 Most Linked To blogs, which has a high barrier of entry, the Technorati Top 100 Most Favorited is a list that is much easier to break into.
Source: Dosh Dosh’s Ultimate Technorati Favorites Exchange: An Interactive Experiment
Happy experimenting and best of luck!
Update:
Amit Agarwal writes that Technorati Favorites is not Worth it Anymore. It's led to an interesting conversation on his blog.
Perhaps, Technorati could provide users a negative vote too (as on Reddit or Digg). Thus any blog that's got an unfair rank simply by gaming the system wouldn't sustain the advantage very long.
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