Ping Your Way to a High Technorati Ranking

Two months ago, I posted an article called, "Technorati Link Optimization: Getting What You Deserve" that explained how the Technorati blog search engine uses inbound links to blogs to decide how important a blog is, and thus how high to rank the site. In my opinion, if a site chooses to link to you, you should deserve credit for the link to you site on blog search engines like Technorati. I figured out a way to optimize the Technorati ranking of this site by detecting who's linking to the site, and pinging sites that hadn't already pinged themselves.

This led to some criticism from people who considered this a manipulative marketing tactic. Some people seemed to think that it was unfair or somehow unethical to ping other blogs on their behalf in order to get credit for the link on blog search engines. Others emailed to get a better understanding of what I was really doing to optimize our site's Technorati ranking.

Since I haven't seen a compelling argument against this blog search engine optimization tactic, and think it actually rewards good blogs who receive unsolicited links from other sites, I decided to break down exactly how it's done with a real-life example.

1. The site below, The Spam Diaries, wrote a post yesterday that included references to some recent posts on Technology Evangelist about comment spam prevention:

Technorati Inbound Links

However, Technorati did not record the links from The Spam Diaries to Technology Evangelist, which should have appeared between the two links listed below:

Technorati No Link Yet

To address this, I clicked on my Bloglines bookmarklet to find the feed URL for The Spam Diaries:

Then submitted this information along with the site's URL and title to Pingomatic:

Ping with Pingomatic

Shortly after pinging The Spam Diaries through Pingomatic, Technorati started giving Technology Evangelist credit for this great inbound link:

New Link on Technorati

That's all it takes. Less than two minutes of work leads to receiving credit for an unsolicited link from a 3rd party site. Is this worth doing? The value of a link on Technorati has been calculated at somewhere between $564 - $903 per link, so I've managed to earn between $16,920 and $27,090 per hour for my time. If only I could do this for more than two minutes a day...

Tracking referring links is one of the best ways to discover links from un-pinged sites. Subscribing to a search result on blogsearch.google.com can also be helpful because it does a good job indexing Blogger blogs that may not have been pinged anywhere else.

I assume these links are temporary though? did you get hits from technorati as a result?

They're not temporary. They'll influence the site's Technorati ranking for 180 days since that's the time period Technorati uses for their ranking metrics. And they'll influence traditional web search engine rankings well beyond that unless the linker happens to remove them, which rarely happens.

I don't see anything wrong with this method. The other site already has a link to you. All you are doing it taking credit for it. It would eventually have been done automatically later when the other site pings. You have just made it sooner than later.

I got linked in a VERY popular blog. I pinged the blog, it's still not showing up in my Technorati links.

Such a drag. The one time I'm actually linked in a blog more popular than mine and I'm not given any credit. That would've really helped my ranking too.

Is there any reason why after pinging it still would not work? I feel like this was a huge break for me on Technorati and the darn link just isn't showing up on my profile.

I'm going to try pinging again later, one can only try... I almost want to e-mail Technorati and beg them to give me credit for that single link. It did wonders for my traffic, but having a better rank on Technorati (in the long run) would've helped more.

Comments

1. Posted by: Frank Gruber on March 24, 2006 7:58 AM:

Very insightful post. Just to further clarify, how did you know that the "Spam Diary" was linking to you to begin with if they were not showing up in Technorati? I assume the referring link showed up in a metrics report but I just wanted to make sure.

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