18 October 2009

Technorati has changed its "authority" calculations

In the past, Technorati Authority was a simple number - the number of blogs linking to your website in the past 6 months. Now they have changed the calculation methodology:
  • Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.
  • The new Authority calculation differs from the past version, which measured linking behavior over a longer 6 month timeframe. Please note that links in blogrolls don’t count towards Authority, as they are not indicative of interest in relevant content; we stopped including blogroll links in August 2008.
  • Authority is on a scale of 0-1000. 1000 is the highest possible authority.
They do not offer details of the methodology, presumably preferring to keep the process confidential so bloggers can't easily "game" the system.
In the past, we based Technorati Authority on six months of blogosphere data. Because most searches are looking for items less than a month old, we’re going to narrow that window in a similar way. In the past, because the data window was so long, Authority and the Top 100 lists it powered were relatively static. With the new algorithm, the resulting Authority will better reflect the fast-changing nature of the blogosphere. Its new inherent volatility will also show which blogs are rising and falling in authority, rewarding authors on posting frequency, context and linking behavior, as well as other data inputs.
The new numbers are wildly different from the old ones. I'm guessing that somehow they are incorporating the authority of the blogs that link to your blog as one of the determinative factors.

It will be interesting to see how the Weblog Awards rejigger their categories for small/midsize/large blogs, which used to be determined by Technorati Authority numbers.

Addendum 10/21: "Blog reactions" (links to your blog) are still not shown, but admin says "We'll be bringing back Blog Reactions (in an updated form) soon, so you will be able to see who's linking to you."

Re the sidebar badges being out of date: "I think these are in the works -- stay tuned."

10 comments:

  1. OK, Stan, no more days off for you!

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  2. I thought it was odd that my site jumped from a Technorati rating of 60 to 500...

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  3. Same here. This blog went from mid-80s to 572 and now fluctuates day-to-day. The widget on my home page hasn't updated the number, so perhaps I need to change it. And I haven't been able to determine the new "rank" - if they still calculate that.

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  4. Oh great... I hardly can believe my rank there is 1. just 1. Even though people link to my blog (thank you Stan by the way!). I might as well get rid of it.

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  5. I've seen some "1s" listed for other active blogs. I suspect it means they haven't finished "logging in" all of the relevant data.

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  6. Maybe... Well, hopefully! But I slightly doubt about it, it used to be very low (lower than 5 actually) before the change. Oh well... It doesn't really matter, I won't stop posting.

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  7. I hope it's that they haven't finished calculations since I also dropped to a 1 and I have many recent links.

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  8. I appear to have slipped off the radar altogether.

    http://technorati.com/search?return=sites&q=arbroath.blogspot.com&x=9&y=11

    Mind you, for quite a while before this change, I'd taken Technorati's results with a pinch of salt.

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  9. No - here you are --

    http://technorati.com/blogs/arbroath.blogspot.com

    Authority 601.

    (I typed in "arbroath" rather than the url)

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  10. Many thanks for that Stan!

    And thanks for the email.


    Kev

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