Technorati Confusion

Over the years (my blogging years) I’ve had an up and down relationship with Technorati.

In recent times, it’s mostly been up. Now that I’ve given up on Trackbacks, the Technorati link in the flare at the bottom of each post is my replacement for them.

And on my blog, at the bottom of the left sidebar, I have a link to Technorati and Google so that you and I can check on who is linking to this blog. As a result, I visit Technorati and Google blog search at least once a day and often several times. They both do things differently so I tend to visit both to get a complete picture of who is linking to me at any time.

But there is something about Technorati that I don’t understand. And it’s been bothering me lately.

If you look at the top of the Technorati results for this blog:

You will see that they are counting 2,900 links from 1,245 sites and that the count was last updated 66 days ago. You will also see that 20 posts in the last day linked to my blog. I don’t think the 2,900 link count is anywhere near right.

Google says that number is 4,238 as shown below and Google has been counting links for a lot less time than Technorati.

So I decided to look at some other blogs with similar audiences as mine. After looking around, I settled on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine and Paul Graham, both of which I read and link to regularly. Here is the Alexa chart showing that these blogs have similar traffic to this one.

After looking at Technorati and Google for both Paul and Jeff, I learned that Technorati and Google seem to get similar results on Jeff and Paul’s blogs, but not mine.

Here are Jeff’s stats on Technorati and Google.

and

They match within about a hundred links

Here are Paul’s stats:

and

In Paul’s case, Google has about 500 more links than Technorati, but again it’s fairly close.

There are some other strange things. Jeff’s Technorati count was updated 6 minutes ago, Paul’s was updated 11 days ago, and mine was updated 66 days ago.

According to Technorati, I got 20 posts linking to me in the past day (about the usual), Paul got the same, and Jeff got 18 posts in the last 47 days?

I think something is wrong with the link counting system that Technorati is using and it bothers me to see my link count remain static at 2900 links from 1245 sites for the past couple months while other’s counts are updated hourly.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get Technorati to update my link count more regularly?

The reason that I am makeing such a big deal about this is that I have suggested to a number of companies over the past six months that they use Technorati’s link count as a measure of a blog’s influence and reputation, both for advertisers and inclusion in aggregation services.

Technorati is doing the blog world a great service by maintaining these link counts. But unfortunately, they are not doing it well enough for my taste.