There is something wrong in German bloggerland. For the last three months the authority at Technorati has been basically in freefall for many bloggers, Google has started to take away pageranks too for those who want to make some money by selling text ads, what’s next?
Robert Basic, who runs Basic Thinking which is – with about 2150 backlinks – Germany’s second most popular blog, has been tracking deutsche blogcharts week after week since August and week after week the authority of the majority of blogs has been decreasing. Aggregated the 100 top blogs lost almost 10,000 inbound links compared to their peak. Lots of sensemaking, mourning, introspection and mockery in the discussions ever since.
Jens Schröder from deutsche blogcharts – which lists the 100 most popular blogs written in German based on the authority at Technorati – has dugg into his archives and compiled this chart which displays the number of links necessary to make it number 20 (yellow), 50 (green) and 100 (red) in his list since 2006:
photo credit: deutscheblogcharts.de
While these figures seem rather low when compared to other European countries they also suggest that it might be too early to collectively grab the banjos and sing the blues. There seems to be a global trend that the blogging middle class is losing links and/or authority, most likely because a couple of blogs in the fat head are collecting most via-links which used to be the currency between blogs and reflected their relationships.
What’s interesting in Germany is that there are no profiteers in this phenomenon. The most popular blogs are also stagnant or on the decline, the power laws have not kicked in yet.
October 27th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Marcus, IMHO technorati is seriously dropping the ball. If I care is another question. I ping technorati every time I post. For over a month my pings did not register. They do again now. But their is a month gap where Technorati saw and still does not see those posts. The time coincides the departure of David Sifry. In my opinion some but not all of technorati’s functionality stopped working. I haven’t looked to see if American a-list blogs suffered a similar fate.
Fact is, is that technorati is bleeding intellectually. I have stopped caring. Companies like Lijit could add similar functionality to their product to take over from technorati and do the job well. But really, a Yahoo or a Google should be doing this. I wonder how anycompany could survive offering this service if it does not get taken over by one of the big three. I wrote a post about this myself last month. I think Technorati is self destructing. I don’t see any future for it in these circumstances
October 27th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Aaron Brazell on twitter by coincidence (if that exists)
I’m sorry but technorati should be used for nothing
October 27th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Don, yep, Technorati has a long history of serious flaws and in part technicalities might be the cause here. But for good reason or bad Technorati still is the only service which is emotionally tightly associated with many bloggers narcisstic ego regarding stats…
October 28th, 2007 at 12:23 am
I find Technorati tends to have purges on link-farm blogs every so often, and down goes our ranking. As we get bigger, we tend to get more link-farm pickup so that may be waht you are seeing?
I still don’t have a clue how Google Blog Search’s alogorithm works, it only has about 1/5th of the links Technorati records, but we know Technorati is more accurate because our platform stats software tells us who is linking.
We also find that Technorati, despite the ping delays, is still far faster than Google (we last timetested time taken to get our FoWA posts up in early October, Google was taking up to 8 hours whereas Technorati’s longest then was about 20 minutes. Also, taking our 4 or so FoWA posts as an example, if we type “FowA” into Google we only ever see one of the posts. Go figure….
October 28th, 2007 at 11:35 am
What also bothers me is the conversation. Where is Technorati in this conversation. They are not involved in this conversation. My lst email got no reply. On the Technorati blog there is little news except the new CEO and a power outage in late September (could that be the cause of the problems).
Fact is that because they were/are not tracking blog reactions, ratings/ authority will fall. That is the basic functionality they have been offering for a very long time. That it is half broken says an awful lot.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
[…] denke, das an allen (Blog)Ecken erwaehnte Blogbluesegesumme wuerde etwas leiser ausfallen, wenn sich einige Blogs zu einem wie dem erwaehntem […]
October 30th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
That is surprising