Technorati ‘Most Authority’ System is Flawed
I just realised today that Technorati’s blogfinder search by “Most Authority” is flawed. Why? Let’s do another Formula 1 test case (yes, you can see we love the F1 sites we run here! 
).
Do a blogfinder search for Formula 1 in Technorati and sort by authority (http://www.technorati.com/blogs/formula+1?sort=authority) .What is the number one site? A site with only 6 posts on F1! In fact, you have to go all the way down to position 5 before you even find a site that is only about F1.
The only reason the other sites seem to have more authority is because they are linked to by more blogs than the others. Unfortunately, Technorati’s system does not compare to Google’s linkback PR calculations. Technorati’s is way too basic.
What is to stop the biggest blogs with hundreds (thousands?) of links from other blogs from simply adding more and more categories on topics they don’t even care about? They’ll get a no. 1 listing on virtually any category they choose..
March 11th, 2006 at 10:45 am
A lot of pioneer sites enjoy more respect than they have earned … Technorati is one of them. They are stuck. Yet they will always be remembered as one of the first blog directories and bookmark sites. Crazy!
March 11th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
All up I think Technorati isn’t that bad.. but they definitely have some room to improve if the theory about their ‘Most Authority’ ranking is correct..
March 11th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
I too have noticed how poor the “most authority” listings are. The top listings are usually outdated and not relevent or interesting.