So I'm just like the rest of you. I treat PageRank updates like a sporting event. I also monitor things like the Dirt 100 which uses an algorithm to rank the top 100 Celebrity blogs (aside from a few major anamolies, it does a good job).

The one thing that kept sticking out to me is how PopCrunch was sitting below other sites with far less traffic. Perhaps the most glaring issue was the low Technorati score that PopCrunch was assigned.

So I went over to the EatonWeb Celebrity category rankings to see if PopCrunch was getting a bad score there as well. Indeed it was.

At EatonWeb, I have database access, so I logged into see what was depressing the score. Turns out that the Technorati API was returning a big fat 0 for both total links and total blogs. Ouch. I knew that this was wrong.

Then I went over to Technorati and saw that the PopCrunch Authority score was something ridiculously low like 88. Crazy. Didn't make sense.

So then I started contacting Technorati support. The same guy probably got all five of my requests;-)

I never got a response. But within 24 hours, PopCrunch was showing a more appropriate Authority score of 617 and had found its way into the Top 5K. Further, the total links and total blogs number started returning some accurate figures.

I have no idea what was wrong. But the take home lesson is this: BlogJuice, EatonWeb, SEOMoz Page Strength and a whole slew of ranking tools (probably even GOOG itself) use Technorati data to evaluate the strength and authority of websites. And the temptation is to assume that a massive company like Technorati gets everything right.

Well that's wrong. Today I found out that Technorati wasn't tracking or storing data properly for at least one blog. I wonder how many others are out there with the same problem. You'll only know if you look;-)

Folks,

We do a lot of experimentation - hence the term XSEO. We basically take risks so that you don’t have to. So I wanted to discuss some of the things we are up to here at RELAX SEO Services, not a lot of implementation detail but some interesting results. Right now, we have pretty good indexing at Google ™ but suddenly, we wound up with a lot of pages in supplemental and the referrals from Google went down substantially … So we had to ask ourselves if we care … and the answer is “no”. We have the keywords we want, which means the ‘on the page’ optimization is alright but more importantly, we are actually getting more hits from Technorati and StumbleUpon than from G these days. I am pleased with this, it means that our pages are important to people, not machines (spidies) and that is exactly what we set out to do from day one. The only reason for putting the site on the web was to try our new ideas for Web 2.0 SEO (XSEO), we actually had clients long before we had this website.

Another interesting observation is del.icio.us is currently throttling us (and I guess begging us to stop trying to connect to them), the only thing I can think of that would cause this was a script from hell we installed about a week ago … it came from a German link building site. This script generated massive errors just from mouseMoves over the page. If you want to know who distributes this little dandy, just contact me and I’ll tell you who to stay away from … as I said before, we take the risks. As I have mentioned time and time again, the clues are all on our site. This is how it works: We brainstorm an idea, then we pick an existing page on our site to test with, so if your watching carefully you will see stuff pop up on the page. If we obtained the desired result … it stays, else we cut it loose. Point is it could be anywhere in our structure, we just pick a page and go.

All in all, we’re happy (we don’t worry - we RELAX). With regards to the G controversy, I once said “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” … OK, maybe that was somebody else who said that but time will tell if Google is really pulling a fast one or not. :-P

Dave,
CE - PSEM - RELAX SEO Services
www.relaxseo.com

I found a weird thing on my Technorati profile. While I was looking for a Technorati badget to be put on here, I saw a weird thing. Under my photo, it says that I'm a member since Dec 31 1969! Did I see it wrongly? Certain I didn't because I've taken a screenshot to prove it.

Did you see that in your Technorati profile?