UPDATE 1/30/2010: bayareatechpros.com has finally been approved. I should note that the thumbnail of the website remains unchanged and I am unable to edit site info or do anything with the claim at this point.
UPDATE 1/7/2010: An employee, Phillip Winn, who is a senior web developer has taken up a PR stance and resumed replying to the thread. It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.
Technorati has been an authorative and integral part of the blogosphere, positioning itself as a benchmark and indexed search engine for blogs in the start of the Web 2.0 boom. This was then, however, and how fast things change…
In October to November of 2009 a peculiar problem arose, the real-time search engine of Technorati was no longer indexing new blogs. According to some wizardly mathemagic a new blog is created every second and Technorati, as a search engine, is not indexing any of the 26,000,000+ new blogs which were created in the past 2+ months, according to math.
But Technorati’s inactivity does not end here, a brief look over Get Satisfaction, Technorati’s official support forum, shows an utter lack of support resolution. Technorati employees are no longer offering support or resolutions. A thread, created by an employee in early November, claims that Technorati is hard at work “drastically speed[ing] up the blog claim review process”, DW provides further analysis. Fair enough; however, after my detective analysis I noticed that the last post from both employees comes on November 25th, the one year anniversary of 2008 Technorati layoffs, where their high performers were replaced by lower paid and lower skilled workers. No posts were made after the 25th.
A review of their official blog quickly sets off new alarms, the last update was on 10/21/09, something about manually sifting out all the Acai berry and make money at home crap from their entire index while working on a brand new clean data set. Prior to this date the format seems to be two posts per month, after this date there are no posts.
Lets leave their domain for a second, and look at Technorati from a 3rd perspective…
Traffic Trends.
Checking Google Trends shows an obvious decline, with some empty blocks. I downloaded the CVS and removed Jun 29, 2008 to Feb 15, 2009 as it would upset the graph. I put the data into a scatterplot and added a trend line, which forecasts Technorati’s coming demise.
Now, if we move from Google’s trendlines and check out Alexa’s more detailed stats (alexa only tracks users who have the Alexa tracking cookie, afaik). Technorati’s search volume, visitor count, and total reach is dropping faster than the 911 stock market.
So what does all this mean?
Technorati is on life-support, its pre-built scripts and algorithms are able to pull content from other sites and generate a dynamic page without human input. Search engines supposedly place higher value on websites listed on Technorati, which is terrible. Technology strategists at Tequinox have written Technorati an open letter warning of impending doom if they choose to continue these fraudulent lending business practices.
Thank you for the enlightening post! I am one of the people waiting since before Thanksgiving, and like you have been “crawled” and certified as having the token, but other than that, I also suspect no one works there. it’s time the other search engines stop using Technorati results as anything but historical info. They are now irrelevant given the speed at which new, relevant content sites are created. Thanks also for your work at this analysis!
Awesome post! Love the research and trending analysis. I’m going to leave a comment on my (similar) blog post for readers to check this site as well. Really well-written.
Mike
Thank you for this post! As a newbie to this blogging thing I was beginning to think I was alone in “Technorati Purgatory”!
It’s a bit frustrating to keep hearing marketing/SEO “experts” touting Technorati as a “must have”.
Your research and graphs make this stand out head and shoulders above the rest!
Ron
As of yesterday, blog claiming is rebuilt and up and running. I know it’s been more than frustrating for bloggers waiting to be crawled – we are working through the backlog of claims now and should be back to normal soon.
In 2009, we rebuilt Technorati.com from the ground up, including search. Since blog claim was built on top of our search technology, the next step was to rebuild that as well. More details are here: http://blog.technorati.com/. We’ve just come through a major rebuilding phase, which we’ve talked about here: http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/big-changes-coming-at-technorati-the-ceos-perspective/ but as a company, last two quarters have been our best ever. Happy to have you visit anytime.
Jen
blog claiming is not up and running. there are pages and pages of people in you “get satisfaction” area BEGGING for attention and help. Your service is terrible. Questions are unanswered and people are frustrated
Perhaps, instead of commenting on other peoples blogs you should take a moment and help out the people on your own site.
http://getsatisfaction.com/technorati/topics/_we_encountered_a_problem_reading_your_blog_error?utm_content=reply_link&utm_medium=email&utm_source=reply_notification#reply_2231734
sorry to sound so nasty but I have been jerked around by Technorati for 4 months now.
Technorati’s service remains stagnant, and it appears the community is even more frustrated based on the assertion things were moving again. I’ve been waiting since November 24th (the date Technorati stated they were reviewing last Thursday).
As promised, if anything changes, I’ll keep you posted.
I promised an update… Today, my claim that was outstanding since November 24 was finally approved.
Here’s the message you can expect (upon successful validation)…
Jan 18, 2010. Congratulations, you claim is now complete! Your site should appear in Technorati.com search results within 24 to 48 hours.
I still believe Technorati has a significant issue to address both on the customer service side, and their processing capabilities. I’m unsure whether I will remain active in their community.
Jen McLean,
I’m one of the many who for some unknown reason Technorati cannot seem to find the token. In my case it’s now on not one but two posts. The frustration level with what should be a process that takes seconds is indeed high.
Thanks for your input and perhaps insight.
Thanks for a good post. The power of Technorati on search engines is truly horrifying.
What really interests me though, is that what’s the next Technorati? What will be the new top blog site? Usually when the carcass smells this bad, the competitors advance in leaps.
Excellent post.
It is hard to imagine how Technorati are still in the top 1,000 sites according to their Alexa ranking.
Either Alexa is either wrong or a lot of people are coming back to Technorati in hope that it is still active.
Amazing. The company is doing better than ever? No wonder they don’t care much about the people having problems with their blog claims working properly on their site. I guess their previous rankings as well as their glowing recommendations from outdated books and websites are keeping their income alive and well.
So IS there a replacement Technorati yet?
The issue for many is that once the blog gets claimed they cannot get into the actual blog directory.
My blog is film and celeb based and would feature on page 2 of the film category IF i could actually get into the directory, i have tried writing on their “Get Satisfaction” forum but i get NO satisfaction.
I also note the number of blogs listed in the directory categories keeps going down as if people are being bumped from the actual directory.
So the question is how do you actually get into the Blog directory, the advice i was given is that i would get in once my Tech Authority rose but i’m at 427 at the moment so i feel thats high enough.
@alex: Well done.
Technorati Blog is closed :(