Technorati - A Reliable Benchmarking Tool?

by Michel Smith (Veshengro)

Can Technorati be trusted as a yard stick for blogs and such like?

The reliability of Technorati as a benchmark as to how well a blog (or such) is performing must be called in question here as, again and again, Technorati are having serious - more or less ongoing - problems, or as they would term it “the Technorati monster escapes”. To say that Technorati be about as reliable as flipping a coin might be a little unfair but things are getting worth rather than better and there are continuous issues that do not seem to get - properly - resolved. All that users keep getting are excuses, excuses and more excuses.

I doubt that those of us that write more or less professional on blogs have the time to try and manually ping the things again and again and still get no update of posts or of authority or in grade. I certainly do not have the time to spend the gods only know how long and how often on the Technorati site to ping the system manually despite the fact that the auto-ping is installed on my sites.

Hence, can Technorati really be seen as a valid guide and yard stick as to how well or not a blog or website is doing and where it stands as to readers and such? The answer here, I think, from what is being experienced by everyone who uses Technorati to index their blogs, must be an categorical no. Every time that those issues happen updates and ratings go to pots and more often than not, even when a site has been manually indexed by the admins of Technorati the ratings are often not restored. This has happened to my sites more than once now and hence I can but say that Technorati can only be seen as a very loose guide and not as the real benchmark.

It can be used, maybe, to some degree as a guide of how a site, a blog, may be performing, especially with regards to articles being cross-posted and such but that is, in my opinion and especially experience, about all.

For many of us as professional and semi-professional bloggers advertising revenue and such like depend on the ratings, unfortunately, on Technorati, as many potential advertisers or companies that one approaches for product samples use Technorati as a guide. The same is true in order to gain media accreditation to many conferences, shows, trade and consumer fairs. Many of those that make the decisions there as to who may gain entry to such events on a press badge go by the ratings of a blogger's site on Technorati and the constant problems with that site can cause us more than a little problem, of that I am sure; it has to me.

Hopefully, one of these days, maybe, just maybe, the Technorati site will actually work for more than a week without those ongoing issues and the ratings could actually be trusted. Presently, however, this is hardly the case.

© M Smith (Veshengro), August 2008
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