Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » Technorati Authority: Good Idea, But not there yet

Technorati Authority: Good Idea, But not there yet

Posted on May 7th in Ramblings — One Comment so far. Got something to say?

Technorati recently updated their ranking system… kind of. They changed the format from x Links from y Blogs/Posts to x Authority with y Blogs/Posts linking. This isn’t quite fixing the problem, but more disguising it.

The Problem

Technorati could rank blogs more efficiently and fairly by changing their algorithm. How, one might wonder?

The Solution

Here’s what I’m thinking. This isn’t new or painfully original, but hear me out. Technorati needs to adopt a more PageRank like system. Instead of measuring shear amount of links (or sites that link) each site’s rank should be broken down into three factors:

Total links. If one site links to the blog a ton of times, then this is where that comes in.
“Authority”, or just the amount of sites in total that link.
Quality. Here’s where things start changing. Each blog is given a quality score out of 100 or so, and this will have a heavy impact on the rating of the blogs it links to.

For example, lets say Engadget has 27,000 sites linking to it. But 15,000 of those sites have a quality score of 5 or 6. Really crappy sites, that are probably auto-bot posted anyways. Engadget’s rank would be heavily affected by that.

This takes the focus off people trying to do whatever they can to get more links and increase their Technorati rank, but awards the sites that have spent time building relationships with other sites and have successfully networked.

The Effect

First off, a lot of people would notice a lot of change in their ranks. The top 100 would get a huge shuffle personal blogs much like this would see a nice increase. This is assuming that one person gets slow quality links over a huge tech blog getting tons of crappy ones.

Also, Technorati would be able to add a ton of features using their new, improved and actually worthwhile algorithm. All the sorting options, rankings, popular, new, etc… items could be revamped, added on to and improved.

Furthermore, Technorati could use an aesthetic overhaul and complete redoing which would get a lot of critics (including myself) off their back. They have so much potential to just be fantastic instead of OK or good.

P.S. This is my 100th post! It may be released on a timer, but 100th none the less.