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Technorati Authority: New measure for blog influence?

May 6, 2007 21:02

On May 4 US time, Technorati made some new changes to its blog ranking system. It introduced a new Technorati Authority rank which now determines a blog's position within its Most Linked-To ranking system.

Technorati Team member Dorion Carroll explained that Technorati Authority is "the number of blogs linking to a Web site in the last six months". The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

Importantly, multiple links from the same blog don't add to Technorati Authority, as they just come from the same echo chamber. In other words, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still counts as only +1 toward your authority.

Put it another way, each new link to your blog will be taken to account for your Technorati Authority for 180 days after it has been tracked.

Meanwhile, the classic Technorati Rank is still a good indicator of a blog's relevance within the entire blogosphere.

Technorati's Carroll explained that Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top.

The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top. [...]

The #1 ranked blog is the blog with the most other distinct blogs linking to it in the last six months. If your blog's rank is, say, 305,316, this indicates that there are 305,315 blog ranks separating your blog from the #1 position.

Under the new ranking system, my other Malaysia-centric blog at Screenshots is now ranked at 1,078 by Authority, and 1,809 by Most-Linked classification--with 6,932 links to this blogger.







For illustration, Engadget has an Authority of 27,491, while Boing Boing was 20,856 at the time I blogged this. These are the world's Top 2 blogs measured by unique links.

In contrast, Screenshots is about 1,809 positions away from Engadget--the Number One blog in the world--tracked among some 71 million blogs monitored by Technorati on the World Wide Web.

In May last year, Technorati was tracking only 55 million blogs in the know universe. Sixteen million new blogs, that's how fast the blogosphere has grown in the last one year or so.

At this point in time, we don't really know how the response from the bloggers community would be vis-a-via the new Technorati ranking system.

However, the DoshDosh blog has a good description of these changes on Technorati. The blogger gives a good explanation of the changes, including navigating the blog profile pages on Technorati.

Another vivid observation on Technorati's Authority Rank has come from Instigator Blog. He says: "It's clear that a higher Technorati Authority is better."

Stan Schroeder is also monitoring the matter as Technorati Blog begins to shed light on its new ranking algorithm.

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