It’s no secret that Technorati’s top lists can be gamed with some relatively simple techniques. Technorati bases its popularity rankings on the number of inbound links, and, like everything else, the number of inbound links can be blown up through artificial means. Same goes for Techorati’s list of top favorited blogs, and the latest way to game this list is the “Technorati favorites exchange meme”. It’s a simple “I rub your shoulder, you rub mine” type of strategy where those who thought of it first fare well while others down the chain get breadcrumbs.
Now, some might say that this is a perfectly legitimate “strategy” of increasing the position of your blog on Technorati, but it’s not, because it has nothing to do with the concept of favorites. The idea behind Google’s PR algorithm and Technorati rankings is to measure natural links and natural favorites. In the following example, a blog that almost entered the top 100 Technorati favorited blogs has a Technorati ranking of 62.417. See a discrepancy here?
Furthermore, this type of mindless favorite reciprocating is creating an inflation of favorite links which will in turn make it impossible for any new site to reach the heights of the top 100 list through any natural means (natural meaning people actually liking the site, and adding it to favorites because they like it).
The same goes for MyBlogLog, whose widget I’ve removed from the site. One reason I did this was it slowing down the site, but another, equally important reason was that the service was getting far from the ideal of being a place to find new interesting sites. It is becoming more of a spamfest, breeding various XXXXk bloggers projects with absolutely no other value or purpose than to get high on MyBlogLog’s top lists.
This is a pattern that emerges in many others (if not all) social media sites. Whenever there’s a benefit from sheer volume of friends, favorites, or any other type of link in a network, people will start abusing it by going for sheer quantity. On Digg, if you want to be a successful submitter, it pays off to have a lot of friends. Where does that lead? Into friend-inflation; users are adding thousands of friends in hope that they’ll reward their “friendship” by voting for their stories. After a while, it gets pointless, because it’s impossible to actually follow what all those friends are doing, but there’s no turning back because your value in this particular social network is largely determined by the number of friends you have.
The solution? Fix the algorithms to put much more emphasis on the quality than the quantity of links. Punish reciprocating patterns by reducing the ranks of sites which indulge in such practices. Right now, everything counts in large amounts - and it’s hurting the user experience on social media sites.
*update: completely by accident, as I’ve finished writing this article, I noticed a hefty increase in the Technorati rank for FranticIndustries, which now sits in the top 2700 sites - an increase of approx. 400 spots. Since there was no huge burst of new links towards the site, I reckon that this might be some kind of severe correction on Technorati’s part, which devalued sites with bogus links and rewarded sites with quality links (this site has a really solid number of links from highest quality sites). If this is the case, good job.
