Posts Tagged ‘indexing’

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.

Related posts

• Google ‘indexing’ now Real-Time
• Blog Spam Increasing
• Twelve Simple SEO Basics (Part 1)

I’m sure I read a quote somewhere saying that PubSubHubbub is like the Web on Crack (I can’t seem to find the quote). I’m not crazy enough to have tried Crack but it must be good if it’s anything like the new publish/subscribe messaging paradigm.  PubSubHubbub is the Google initiative which, in plain English, monitors RSS and Atom Feeds and distributes the content at break-neck speed. Sick of waiting hours or days for your content to be indexed then you will love PubSubHubbub!

Essentially this great new Pub/Sub paradigm means that content published by you and I via RSS or Atom is distributed to the wide world like, now! Here’s an example of how it works;

Feedburner used to check for updated site feeds every 15 minutes or so. This obviously meant a delay from the time of publishing new content until the content appeared in Feedburner. Google Search, Technorati etc. would then take further hours or days to include the new content in SERPs (Search Results Pages). As of a few days ago, if you have PingShot enabled in Feedburner, then as soon as new content appears in your Site feed it will be available in your Feedburner feed. Almost at the same time any Content system hooked up to PubSubHubbub will pick up the new content (rather than waiting hours or days for the many bots to index your site).

In the good old days before PubSubHubbub (o.k., it was only a few days ago), we’d ping the various services (ping-o-matic, Icerocket, King Ping, Yahoo etc.) when we published new or changed content to ask them to reindex our sites. PubSubHubbub should make this need redundant as it won’t be necessary for the various content systems and Search Engines to index sites for every bit of new or amended content. The content can be attained from PubSubHubbub in near real-time.

I have done a bit of surfing about PubSubHubbub and how this will affect the need to ping the various services. Unfortunately there appears very little information available as to who will attain information from PubSubHubbub and if the need for pinging still remains (I certainly won’t be ceasing pinging until more information is available about PubSubHubbub and the need for pinging).

P.S. It’s pretty awesome that as I publish this post it’ll be available on Google search for those looking for information about this topic.

Related posts

• How Technorati Calculates new Blog Authority
• Speed up your Website to keep Visitors
• Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner Not Working – A Solution?