Four reasons Technorati is losing its edge
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I read yesterday about Technorati’s new look. The site was pretty much down all yesterday so I could not look at it. While some may think their move is a good thing, I’m not so sure. I could be proved wrong and time will only tell if I’m right or wrong about my assumptions.
Here is a list of my concerns:
1. A while back they took away counting the number of links to a blog and now they refer to the popularity with an authority number. On the surface this may seem good as many of the better blogs have a large number of other blogs linking to them, but there is also a flaw in this system. Let’s say SPLOGS. Many people build splogs and interlink them all together. This will inflate the authority number and make a blog look better. While you could have the same effect with showing the number of links, the connotation of using Authority makes this seem like a more important number.
2. With the introduction of all the new type of content besides blogs, Technorati is getting away from its core competency it has built in allowing people to find relevant blog content in an easy to use interface. They should stick to what they are good at.
3. I noticed today that they are now grabbing all your post and displaying it on their site. While this may be good for increasing Technorati’s stickness, it does nothing to help drive traffic to your blog. This one is the biggy for me. I try to tag almost every post, but if that means I can’t enjoy the benefit of the traffic from Technorati then why should I write my content for someone else?
4. They have integrated all the various content from Blogs to Video, to Audio when you search for a particular tag. While this may be useful to some users, it will kill the blogs. Users searching for content will be much more likely to click on a Video picture as they will a Blog link. Really the only hope Bloggers have it to create sensational headlines that outweigh the videos. Something that will be difficult to accomplish. And it will probably lead to more link bait type articles when the blog post content does not really match the headline.
I’m just not sure this is a good move. It may be good for Technorati, but it’s not good for the publishers. Without the publishers of content Technorati has nothing. Technorati has always been a great resource, but if the continue down this path, I’m not sure it will be useful much longer. Web 2.0 is great and I understand this they want to be more of a web 2.0 site, but at the expense of losing their edge is not worth it. I will tag this post so Technorati readers have a chance of seeing it, but this may be my last tagged post to Technorati. I also created a WTF on Tecnhorati for this post. If you agree with my assessment of this topic, please comment on the WTF
If you don’t agree feel free to leave a comment and tell me why I’m wrong. I may be wrong but I just don’t see how these moves help bloggers at all.
[tags]web 2.0, technorati, SEO, generating traffic[/tags]
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