Technorati Authority = Google Pagerank v0.01

It’s been a few weeks since Technorati released its “Authority” ranking system (on May 4th). I hope you already start to know me so you should have probably guess that I tried to understand what was behind that apparently nice new ranking system.

Technorati is in fact an Internet Search Engine but dedicated to blogs. So Technorati issues are more or like the same than any other search engine like Yahoo or Google. The main issue being building a robust and fair ranking algorithm to index all the blogs so that you find the most accurate results when searching for a particular keyword.

Technorati publishes the ranking of the blogs using mainly two criteria. The first one being the number of users that selected your blog as one their favorites and the second one being the “Authority”. From that Technorati produces two top lists. Here is my opinion on these criteria:

1 - Number of favorites

This criteria is not very reliable because you can add any blog to your favorites then ask the blog proprietary to do the same with your blog. It’s a reciprocal exchange. Everyone will accept this trade. So collecting a high number of blogs that favortite you is a question of time and how much effort in contacting people you want to put in this.

In addition, apart from exchanging favorites, adding a favorite is not really useful because for the most part the Technorati users use a feed reader if they are interesting in one blog (see FeedBurner approach) or a social bookmarking service like delicious.

2- Authority

This is the real one for Technorati. This criteria is defined this way in the Technorati FAQ:

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

So if a blog puts at least one link (it can be more) towards your blog then you increases your Authority by 1. Thus Technorati is using here the so called method of “Link Popularity”. Here is the Wikipedia definition:

The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.

Google used this philosophy as a part of their page ranking algorithm. I don’t know if Technorati uses the Authority in their keyword search engine to filter the results. But they are surely using it to publish a ranking top list. In that context it’s the number of links that count rather than the quality of them.

The big issue behind this is that it is an opened door for the “spamdexing” and particularly what is called “Link farm”. It’s basically a group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. This method was widely used and gave very efficient results for first search engine implementations like Inktomi. These search engines were counting the inbounds link equally as Technorati is doing it. So building communities and link exchange scheme were very efficient to increase the ranking of website pages.

Google and other search engines learned from that experience and rather than simply counting all inbound links equally, the Google PageRank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight.

So is Technorati reinventing the wheel ? As Technorati and blogs in general will became more and more popular the Technorati ranking system will quickly reach its limits and Technorati will be faced to the same issues than search engines back in the 90’s. Unless they are counting on being bought by Google, they’ll have to think about a smarter ranking algorithm.

In fact it has already started because many popular blogs among the top Technorati list make use of “spamdexing” methods. They exchange backlinks with different methods like selling comments back links (without any tag rel=”nofollow”), exchanging links through blog reviews, trading Technorati favorites. These new techniques are referred to as “Evil blogging” but are not different from “spamindexing“.

To conclude I pray for the success of real interesting web content. There is still a lot of work to achieve before search engines understand humans.

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