Rui CarmoI’ve had a long, strange (and mostly troublesome) relationship with Technorati for a good while now, so much so that I’ve had an item on my ToDo page here for years now to figure out why.
Today, I’m taking that off and giving up on it altogether. Here’s five reasons why:
- When I was still running PhpWiki, they couldn’t figure out my site layout or feeds, no matter how much metadata I added (back then the requirement was, IIRC, that you added RDF in the appropriate locations so that they could figure out post boundaries and suchlike).
- When they started handling RSS instead, moving to FeedBurner made my entry disappear for a couple of weeks. I’m not talking about rankings (which I find utterly meaningless), I’m talking about my blog not being listed at all.
- A couple of years back, this is what my Technorati cosmos looked like. It’s well worth clicking through to see what the entire page looked like.
- Soon after that, and after moving to Yaki, I stopped adding Technorati tags to my RSS feeds, since they were obviously not getting processed no matter what I tried. As an example, one of the most popular pages ever on this site is my HOWTO on writing iSync Plugins (which is always at the top of my own referrer listing), and I couldn’t find one mention of it on Technorati.
- Now, thanks to their improvements, not only have I been unable to edit or delete my previous site listing there, the new claim I registered a few weeks back is still being processed:
It’s not that I particularly care about (or, for that matter, have time to follow) my site’s ranking1. I know this is a niche site. I am perfectly aware that what I do or write about here is of interest to a minute percentage of the folk out there (if only because of my refusal to give credit to hype and non-news).
It’s just that it never seemed to work right, its stats bear no relationship whatsoever with what Google Analytics and my own referrer tracking show me, and that I see no point in trying to use stuff that is broken.
I’d like to end this on a positive note, but I can’t really add one of my own, so if you want an example of stuff that isn’t broken and actually makes the web better, pop over to Merlin Mann’s and read his piece on Marco Arment and Instapaper, which is the best thing I’ve read today.
Seriously.
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1 I’ve just had a look at the Alexa listing, and it’s equally fun (and another example of how bad site statistics are overall), since I have to wonder why I’m ranked in Malasyia. It’s stats also don’t match the Google ones in most points.