Monday, January 5th, 2009...2:25 am

What’s Technorati.com and why journalist bloggers should use it

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Soon after I started my parenting blog, a smart colleague of mine tipped me off to Technorati.com. I quickly fell in love.

Here’s why:

Technorati is a site that offers both blog ranking and a search engine, but the really cool thing is it lets you find out immediately who is linking to your blog. (Technorati calls each link a blog interaction.)

That’s important for two main reasons:

  1. You’re  wise to check out the blogs of those bloggers who thought your blog was good enough (or bad enough) to link to. By linking to you, that blogger is helping you gain traffic by introducing your blog to his or her readers. It’s likely you’ll want to read this person’s blog or link back to it. It’s the beginning of a spiral that can get your blog noticed. The first thing I do when I find a blog has linked to me is check it out. Perhaps I’ll comment, send the blogger a thank you or put that blog on my list of “read everyday” blogs.
  2. The more links you get the better it is in the terms of your “Googlebility” — it increases the likelihood that your blog will come up higher on the page in a Google search.

Now, you bloggers may be thinking: “I can find out who is linking to me from my own blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type.” That’s true if you’re blogging on your own. But if, like me, you are blogging for a newspaper, you may not have the same access to your stats as you would if you were blogging solo. (And, while veteran bloggers may know about Technorati and other such services, a lot of newbie journalist bloggers likely don’t.)

Technorati gives you a really valuable ability to know who is linking to you. (You can also find out how many interactions any blog has just by copying the URL of the blog into the “search the blogosphere” space. I’m nosy, and love checking out the interactions of other blogs.)

But Technorati can do more for your blog than that.

Get Authority

If you join for free, you get to set up a profile, and you can “claim your blog.” Basically this is just giving Technorati the right to index you blog, and it enables your blog to be listed in Technorati’s blog directory. Technorati gives your blog an authority,  based on the number of blogs linking to it in the last six months. The higher the number, the better,  according to Technorati’s Weblog. Note, though, that authority is based on the number of blogs linking to you, not the number of times they link. So if the same blog links to you 100 times in six months, it still counts as only one link toward your authority.

If you’re a numbers’ junkie like me, you just like to watch your blog’s authority go up. It’s a thrill to see “no authority” move to 1 and then keep going.

Get ranked

Technorati also gives you a ranking of how far you are from the highest authority blog, which would be ranked #1. The smaller your ranking, the better. Again, this is neat to know because it gives you a sense of where you fit in the whole blogosphere, not just your slice of the world.

Find out stuff

Technorati is a search engine, so once you claim your blog, your blog is listed there. If you use good keywords when you claim your blog, readers looking for a blog on your topic could come upon it. You can also search for blogs this way.

Technorati the lists the top 100 blogs, which is a great resource, especially if you’re looking to read the best-read blogs in your niche. You also can search for the most popular blogs in various categories. Or you can read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which is a five-part report on blogging that every blogger should read.

Get organized

You can also use your Technorati page to organize the blogs you like to read by “favoriting them.” Then you can just go one place and find your favorites, and be able to see who is linking to your favorites and whether your favorite’s authority is going up. (or down.) So if you like this blog, for example, feel free to Favorite it.

More to know

Pinging: For Technorati to index your blog properly, you need to ping each of your posts. That just means your blog lets Technorati know, “Hey, this blog just posted.” You can set up your blog to ping automatically or you can manually ping here and get directions on how to make sure your blog is pinging.

But why does Technorati Authority matter?

Six Pixels of Separation points out that checking on a blog’s authority is a way to assess that blog and how connected it is. But Unique-Frequency makes a valid point that Technorati doesn’t differentiate between links: If a heavily trafficked blog links to your blog, it doesn’t do any more for your authority than if a beginning blog does. (But I would point out that if a heavily trafficked blog links to your blog, you’ll gain a lot more in residual traffic from that link than you will from one from a less popular site.)

My take: For me and my blogs, we use Technorati. It’s not a perfect measure of a blog’s success, but what really is. I’m of the mind that bloggers who want to gain traffic need to do everything than can to do so. So if Technorati only helps a little bit, so be it; it’s better than nothing. Add up a lot of little bits, and they can make a big impact. Plus, it’s just fun.

So I guess that’s enough of my totally unpaid commercial for Technorati. Now, get out there and claim your blog.

– Gina

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