Stuart Jones doesn’t understand Technorati. What with Google being the search engine where everyone wants to be king of the pile I can perfectly understand. Why would anyone care about Technorati? The easiest way to understand Technorati is to think of it as the Google of blogs. Google has a blog search engine but it isn’t terribly sophisticated. Technorati does more than search. It provides a ranking system based on the number of sites that link to your blog. This might sound weird but if you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the bare number of links from your site. If it only worked on links you could cross post between two related sited on every posting and achieve an ‘audience.’ Indeed, some people have tried to fool Technorati into believing they carry more clout than they really do by doing just that.
As you build traffic and people start to notice what you’re doing, you’ll find that links come from all manner of places. This has tremendous value because it means that as part of your giving to the community of 28+ million bloggers, you are getting something back – connections to people you would not have otherwise reached. Why should you care? Let’s face it, professional accounting is not exactly a topic for everyone is it? But if you can demonstrate a level of expertise and knowledge that is welcomed by others then you start to influence people whose authority is seriously valued in all kinds of places. If you need proof of that then check out my profile which is here. Then look at the Clustrmap. Finally look at the kinds of people who are linking to this site. Interesting isn’t it?
The service also allows you to create lists of favourite sites. Mine appear in the sidebar to this blog. Favourites are updated each time someone posts. So for instance, as I’m writing this, i’ve just noticed that Tom Raftery has taken a gong for top Irish Tech Blog. Good for you Tom. He’s one of our contribs on StartMEup so not only is that a feather in Tom’s cap, but we get kudos too for having him as part of the team. Until of course he gets so busy consulting on social software he can’t spend time on our wee project 
Using favourites provides me with a quick and easy way of keeping up to date with what’s happening on the core sites that I’m interested in and not having to race around my RSS reader fishing out useful information. You can see my favourites here. If you’re feeling particularly kind, you might want to make this site a favourite. But before you do all that you need to claim your blog, put a small piece of code onto your site and go from there.
So…is Technorati a replacement for Google? Emphatically not. You still have to do all the stuff you would do to ensure your Google ranking is as high as possible. Is Technorati fair? Well yes and no. Yes in the sense it ranks in absolute terms but no if you want to see a subset of the millions of blogs out there. To counterbalance that, Technorati regularly features blogs that are right out on the edge of the blogosphere – sites that have very little traffic but which contain subject matter that may be of interest to you. So…if you work on your Technorati ranking as well as Google rank, then you’re covering the spectrum of main services designed to help people discover and assess your site. More importantly, others can assess you and the value you bring. Hope that helps.
Technorati Tags: Technorati
