Take a quick look at their Top 100 list. The blog currently at the number 1 position is Engadget. If you click on their summary page you will see that they are number 1, with an authority of 31,053 (as of this writing). Everything seems good.
Now take a look at blog number 100, The Blotter from ABC. According to its summary page it is number 112 with an authority of 3,499 (as of this writing).
If this blog is not in the Top 100 why is it listed in their Top 100 list? How many other blogs are not properly listed in the Top 100 when they should be?
After looking through multiple blogs on the Top 100 list I found that the majority of them were in the accurate position based on their summary pages and some were in the Top 100 but in the wrong place on the list. There are a few possible reasons for the inaccuracies in the list.
- The list is updated via cron job at certain hours of the day
- The list is updated by hand
- The list is so important that it involves money changing hands and new blogs are not just added automaticaly.
I'm hoping it is just an issue of it being a cron job. Constantly regenerating that list (and the most favorited blog list) must be a server drain. Finding the Top 100 out of millions of blogs probably takes a second or two of time on the database server and, with the amount of traffic Technorati gets, generating that list on the fly would likely bring the site down or seriously slow it down.
Why do I think it might be politics or "pay-to-play"? Just look at John Chow's blog summary. He is listed as number 55 with an authority of 4,980. Yet, he is nowhere to be found on the Top 100 list.
It's no big secret that being in the Top 5 of both Technorati lists can get you some nice traffic and exposure. I would hate to think that those top five spaces were under some sort of political pressure. I mean, it's not like Technorati ever removed any blogs from their system for jumping into the Top 5, right?
Wondering about me? HMTK.coms summary page.