Now, for some of you this is not new information, but for me it was a ‘duh’ moment. I knew that people were (gasp) gaming technorati, but I didn’t know how.
The way Technorati works is that you end up, in a search, in order of when you most recently published. Now, that’s default. Some people change that preference when they search, but the vast majority don’t. This creates a very easy and very successful way to game the blog search engine.
So, if I do a search on ‘business blogging’, the blogs that come up *should* all have either just posted on the term or be generally about the term. However, what happens is people use press release feeds to auto-post to their site. Then, after a few minutes (however long the ping process takes to let Technorati know they’ve updated) they automatically remove the post.
That’s why you’ll often do a search on a term and the results won’t match even a tad. I’ve always wondered why that happens, but after reading this article at SEORockstars, now I know.
Aha! Thanks Robyn. I have such a love-hate relationship with Technorati. This just intensifies it all for me.
Ha ha, I feel the same way. I love the traffic I get but I hate to use them to search because of the spam.
Now that I know what to do (ie search by relevance and not by most current) I may go and try them again. Lately I’ve been using Sphere when I blogsearch (or Yahoo news’ beta blogsearch).
You’d think Technorati would do something about this though… To start, how about making the default not be time-based. Might get abused less?
[...] After the recent post on Gaming Technorati, I thought I’d share a little of what I’ve seen about gaming Digg. [...]
Good read. I’m new to Technorati and this is good to know, I noticed this almost immediately and was wondering how big of a problem it was… guess it is a pretty big deal.