How Technorati Calculates new Blog Authority

Gary Eckstein Search Engine Optimization 1 , , , , , , , , , ,

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Technorati has released its new Blog Authority ranking. The amount of detail provided by Technorati as to how the authority is really determined is about as deeply secret as the Coca-Cola recipe or which ‘eleven herbs and spices’ are used by KFC. As per many of us Bloggers, I have been interested in determining how the new Technorati authority is calculated as some of my blogs are getting a reasonable score whereas others are deemed as useless by Technorati (and there doesn’t seem logic in the way the authority is calculated, at this time anyway).

Technorati Indexes RSS Feeds

I do however have a theory; I believe that Technorati is using the data in RSS/Atom feeds as its source data. This means that rather than relying on a ‘bot’/spider/web-crawler, Technorati is relying on information fed to it by the likes of a Pub/Sub system such as Google Pubsubhubbub. Google uses RSS/Atom information as processed by Pubsubhubbub so that it is able to provide near real time Search Results. Have you noticed that your Blog posts are indexed by Google very quickly – this is due to the active monitoring of your RSS/Atom feed through Pubsubhubbub.

And why I think that Technorati has gone Pub/Sub…

  1. The Technorati Authority is updated frequently (there is no way that Technorati is able to have a ‘bot’ to crawl billions of pages a day as well as process them a few times per day).
  2. There is a heavy reliance on recent links and data.
  3. Technorati has noted that Blogroll links aren’t included in Authority rankings (RSS/Atom feeds do not include Blogroll links).

Implications of Technorati using RSS/Atom Data

If Technorati is in fact using the Pub/Sub model then there are various implications for SEO in relation to Technorati. Considerations include:

  1. The data your Feed contains is what is indexed i.e. if your comments aren’t available via a feed then they won’t be indexed.
  2. If you don’t publish/post content frequently then you won’t have content indexed frequently (yes, this is obvious).
  3. Trackbacks/Pingbacks won’t be included as an authority measure.
  4. Inlinks/Backlinks are more important than ever!!!

 

I’m pretty sure that Technorati is using the data from RSS/Atom feeds in indexing and determining Blog authority. This may well put more SEO focus on feed content and supports those SEO experts that say that links are still the most important SEO element.