Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

2/14/2006


Authority and the Groundhog Day Problem

Another problem with the new Technorati Authority filter is that many of us are Bill Murrays caught in our own little Groundhog Day where authority is concerned.

Duncan has posted about the problem twice at The Blog Herald and I have posted about it here as well. While I am a self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati and Dave has a perfect track record of fixing the problem when I go long, it does seem to be a recurring problem.

For whatever reason, my link numbers and those of several others get stuck. I'm stuck at 80 sites and 142 links right now and have been for a few weeks. Every time I get a new link, my oldest one falls off. I probably have between 50 and 100 links that have been temporarily lost (they come back when Dave asks Niall to reboot the list). So this means that as I get more and more links (hopefully due to all the hard work I put in writing and conversing), more and more links fall off the back end. I'm working hard every day, but my authority level stays the same because of this problem.

As I have said before, I am certain Technorati will get this issue fixed. And if I were the only one it was happening to, I wouldn't even post about it. In fact, I feel like a whiner talking about it, but Technorati is a great service and it's more important that we iron out the wrinkles than it is to protect my manly image. So I'll take one for the team and whine a little.

It will be fixed. But in the meantime, it's frustrating. Especially now that our link counts affect the way the filter treats us.

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Posted by Kent @ 2/14/2006 10:29:00 AM | Permalink

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2 Comment(s):

It's not just Technorati that has problems updating its stats regularly. I keep track of the performance of a few dozen blogs and it's frustrating to keep checking the major blog search engines day after day only to find their numbers frozen. As Bill Murray said, "What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today!" And what's worse, they update at seemingly random intervals - I'd rather get a regular weekly or monthly update instead.

That said, Technorati remains my favorite blog search engine.

By Blogger Easton Ellsworth, at 2/15/2006 5:03 PM  
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My blog quit getting updated by Technorati when I would add new entries, whether I did it automated or manual or through a 3rd party like ping-o-matic.

I read something that recommended running it through validator.w3.org. There were several problems that when I corrected most of them, everything updated Technorati almost immediately.

I ran you Ground Hog day page through the validator and it came up with 80 errors. Maybe one of them is preventing Technorati from handling your site properly. It sounds like you might have a different problem, but it couldn't hurt to clean those up and see if things get better.

By Anonymous kalbzayn, at 2/16/2006 12:27 PM  
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