Technorati Links
Doing business today means adopting ’standard practices’ so that generalized statements are true across multiple platforms and web sites.
Unfortunately, often adoption standards is more difficult than we, as the user, realize. Technorati’s decision or indecision as to whether their bots should index content that falls after a NOFOLLOW link is a perfect example.
webpages. Technorati often reports referrers to my own blogs where the
blogger is simply listing me in his sidebar blogroll. Actually, it
wouldn’t be so bad if I got one referrer from that sidebar link, but
Technorati will often repeatedly give me referrers every time that
blogger writes a new entry. So, we have a big problem. Is MSN Spaces
gaming the Technorati index? Guess what, they are not. MSN Spaces is
marking these automated links with NOFOLLOW attributes, as they are suppose to. I then went to the Technorati 100
and checked if they were including links with this attribute and found
out they were. Why is Technorati including NOFOLLOW links in their
rankings? Technorati drafted a specification of the NOFOLLOW standard more than a year ago. More than six months ago, David Sifry wrote "Early this year, a number of search engines including Technorati adopted the rel=’nofollow’ microformat."
David? Are you sure? Cause all the evidence indicates that Technorati
is still ignoring NOFOLLOW attributes. David, what happened to "we have been battling the spam situation in a significant way for about 2 months?"
It’s gotten so bad that over the weekend this was the result you got for the top blog in the blogosphere:
I feel sure Technorati planned to follow these standard html tags (ie the NOFOLLOW tag), but along the way somewhere, the ball was dropped. It happens… However, when you are a company that is so very public, you have to be able to respond immediately, even on the weekends. And, as it stands now, it looks like Technorati has indeed tried to fix this problem, at least by removing that Page Not Found from the number one spot. I did see an MSN spaces blog in the top 100 as of this writing, and I saw several blogs on the list that should not have been there.
While I know they will fix it eventually, it’s a shame to see a service that gets this much use fail on such an insignificant error.
Tags: blog-linking, blogosphere-links, html-tags, msn-spaces, rss-tags, technorati, technorati-error