Not likely. Well… maybe a few disgruntled bloggers but I don’t think it goes too far beyond that. If you haven’t read the latest post at Technorati you might want to click on over and read the latest log by Adam Hertz.
The whole scenerio began unfolding a few weeks back when Brian Pinkerton of Technorati posted an excellent resource on Technorati link calculations. Brian used a blog that had significant link changes as an example of how it works.
On the other hand, others see their counts plummet when a flurry of 180-day-old activity disappears from our radar. In the chart below, the folks at Strumpette made a big big stir about 190 days ago. But that peak of linking activity, just to the left and outside of the red box, is no longer counted. Strumpette’s link counts have been falling for the last week. Bummer.
The part of this that Brian was unaware of is that it is starting to look more and more like it was technorati’s indexing error that caused the drop in traffic, thus lowering the link count. Adam Hertz posted yesterday in response to the mess.
One of the examples Brian used was Strumpette, a well-known PR blog. It had garnered lots of links in the past, but according to our measurements, hadn’t kept up as well recently.
The good people at Strumpette contacted us, understandably concerned that our post had portrayed them in a negative light. They also told us that we hadn’t been processing updates from their blog for a few months, even though they’d complained about it. We looked into this more closely, and it turned out they were quite right.
Strictly speaking, the absence of Strumpette’s posts in our index don’t affect the link count calculation. However, because bloggers in the PR industry frequently use Technorati to track conversation, it’s likely that the omissions reduced awareness of Strumpette’s posts, and therefore that fewer people would link to them as a result. This is a valid argument, and as I told the Strumpette folks personally, we’re really sorry for any harm we may have caused.
Seems sincere. And it’s FAR more than anything Google would have ever done in a similar complaint. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Strumpette. Strumpette responds:
Of course, we appreciate Technorati’s apology and their cooperation. That said, we want to underscore the seriousness of this situation. It has been a very difficult 4 months. Bottom line: This situation has caused us irreparable harm.
So it sounds to me like Strumpette had all their eggs in one basket.
Valuation of internet properties is cumulative. People read popular sites and tend to avoid less trafficked sites. Through Technorati’s negligence, a large percent of our articles could not, and will never, be found or read. As a consequence, our readership has suffered significantly. Most importantly, we can never get back that traffic or the opportunities that traffic would have generated.
The blogosphere is much more different than the every day Internet realm, but that doesn’t at all mean you have a right to anyone else’s traffic does it? Personally, I find the Strumpette post to be arrogant and unworthy of any assistance from the blogosphere in calling for an audit. I work my buns off to get a few visits to the plethora of blogs I own and I guarantee you’ll never see me cry over the fact that a website stopped sending me traffic. Yeah, it sucks. And yeah it’s painful, but that’s life. When I started running websites I was never told I had a right to other people’s traffic. What makes Strumpette better than the rest of us? The blogosphere is a community that shares traffic, not a place where bloggers throw fits when things don’t go their way in traffic.
Making matter worse, we are very concerned about the Edelman-Technorati Deal and the subsequent perception of impropriety. In the announcement of the deal, Edelman PR’s CEO Richard Edelman said, “Technorati provides the best analytic tools for tracking over time and in depth what the blogosphere is talking about. Today, Technorati and Edelman announced that Edelman will have an exclusive right to offer Technorati’s analytic tools [in various languages]… continuing into early 2007.” Edelman, whose Me2Revolution “gang” has openly and often expressed sharp opposition and hostility toward Strumpette, is in bed with the very company accounting for our traffic. Again, we’ve been struggling with this problem with Technorati approximately since the Edelman-Technorati arrangement was announced.
Ahhh! The truth comes out. Sounds like a rival situation where one blog is upset that another got a better business deal.
Tuck your lip back in Strumpette. This is the real world and in the real world you gotta get back up and move on.
My two cents.
PS: As a side note… I have my own complaint with Technorati. Why is it that a blog who is clearly spamming the tag system gets a plug in the Technorati blog? Look at the links mentioned in this post and click on “Thong Speed Blog“.
From what I see it’s OK to have tags like “oral sex” and “going down” on a post that mentions nothing of the sort. At least, Technorati bloggers seem to think so.
I’m not saying I deserve the link because I don’t, but certainly Aaron Krane could have found a better blog to plug. Am I wrong?
