Technorati: When Will The Traffic Party End?
Michael Arrington
52 comments »
Recent Comscore stats show Technorati continuing to surge in traffic, more than tripling since a year ago. Founder and CEO Dave Sifry recently mentioned about this staggering growth in a blog post. Technorati’s internal numbers showed massive growth early this year. They had nine million unique visitors in March, up from 3.5 million two months prior. And page views, he said, were up 141% over the previous three months.
There just isn’t any plausible explanation for traffic gains like these. Except that the company has perfected their search engine optimization approach, particularly with regard to Google.
For the last several months, Technorati “tag” results have risen steadily in Google search rankings. Technorati is now linked in the top few results for thousands of high-volume search terms: See MySpace (6th), Facebook (4th), Wikipedia (4th), etc.
The reason these terms are appearing high in Google search results is because Technorati was synonymous with tagging, and most tagging plugins for blogs default their tag links back to Technorati. Each day, tens of thousands of blogs have multiple links back to Technorati; one for each tag they use to describe their post. All of those links create massive search engine relevance and drive Technorati results higher in search results for commonly tagged words.
But there is a big problem looming for Technorati: their tag results pages are essentially search results. And Google doesn’t like to show search results within search results. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently wrote a post called “Search Results in Search Results” on his personal blog. He says that Google generally looks to exclude search results from their web search index; and they suggest to other search engines that they include a “disallow” note in their robots.txt file to let Google know that they results shouldn’t be indexed.
Google wants to keep people from clicking more than once to get where they want to go. Having them do a search on Google, and then being directed to Technorati to see a tag search, is counter to that goal.
But Technorati doesn’t disallow tag search within their robots.txt file. Compare Technorati’s file to what Google uses for their own blog search engine.
Technorati will argue that tag search isn’t normal search, and so the results should be indexed. But Google does not index tag results pages for its own YouTube property. Technorati tags are directly analogous to YouTube tags, and there is no reason why Google would keep Technorati in the index, but exclude their own properties.
But what really matters here is what Google thinks, and whether they will take steps sometime soon to remove those results from the Google index. If that were to happen, Technorati’s traffic would plummet. And their lucrative traffic party would come to an end.
Mike,
Why rain on their parade?
Parades occur. Rain happens. I just report on it. It’s not like Google isn’t fully aware of this.
Interesting post. Tags are often use for spam..so Google exclude search results for this: but maybe in the future the things will change.
What’s the better way to index the results on Technorati?
I can myself feel the traffic in technorati.Im just a new blogger.I wrote a blog post on “how to download youtube videos” in my blogspot blog.That got me near 250 unique visitors that day.It maybe low,but still that is what I need.Technorati is surely a very good site and the population might even increase four times.
I was always wondering what happens if Google deletes all those search results leading to Technorati. Will we know then how many regular users Technorati has?
Wikipedia is also very popular.
Until a year ago, Amazon was very popular for several years
Besides Tagging, quality backlinks and TRUSTRANK may be major factors.
That combination can make a site very successful
I check Technorati every day to see who has written about bla.st. Perhaps millions of other people are checking their own sites too?
http://www.technorati.com/search/bla.st
One of our sites got removed from the Google index a week ago. Why is it that Google is gonna decide what’s best in terms of user experience? We get love letters every week from people that like our visual index and guided search.
Another thing to keep in mind is that every wordpress dashboard on the web is making calls to technorati to find backlinks.
Google used to index YouTube search result pages.
my opinion is that technorati doesn’t provide much value to end-users (ie people who don’t blog), so their traffic number don’t really reflect their value. though it’s an unvaluable service for bloggers, that’s for sure.
Mike,
I wrote about these changes to Google’s SERP a couple of months ago:
http://www.optimizeandprophesi.....es_fo.html
Technorati’s problem, as you mention is that their landing page sucks.
FYI: The links to the Google searches are borked…
Plugin authors should include nofollow for external tag links. (hopefully WP does this for 2.3)
Sites such as Technorati, Icerocket are constantly changing (Technorati being the more spammy one) and can not be trusted to use Google terms. Hence why nofollow.
Actually, even Wiki links should get a nofollow due to the nature of a wiki. Every non locked wiki page can look totally differently the day after anyone links to it, hence not trustworthy and nofollow required.
On another note, why would I not use nofollow when linking to Technorati, or Wikipedia for that case, if Technorati considers links to external/our sites not trustworthy and smacks a nofollow on everything?
And forgotten : Google wants to keep people from clicking more than once to get where they want to go
That sounds pretty bad for Digg.com
Agree with Franky..
But digg links are better than technorati as it is mob approved.
I hate technorati tags, they are useless as technorati auto-creates tags when it crawls through your blog and now at the end of every post you find so many tag-back (trackbacks) to technorati.
Technorati is slow and at times in-accurate and google should remove the technorati search results as they are semi-spam!
@Spaces Maps, Digg should never rank higher than the source IMNSO.
For now and in the (near) future, anything that’s user-generated is probably going to continue to be a major factor when it comes to traffic on the web. Technorati is slow at times, and I’ve had serious issues being able to add blogs to the site. But, it’s content is more user-generated (people follow their favorites) as anything else.
Rumor has it, though, that Jason Calacanis’ new Mahalo is going to soon overtake all of them with traffic, even wikipedia.
It sounds like a good time to sell for technorati - RB
Technorati’s WTF feature drives almost zero traffic, in my experience. If prominent placement in top search results pages doesn’t drive traffic, I don’t know what will. I see far more traffic direct from Google, from StumbleUpon etc. than I do from Technorati - fwiw. I really want to see technorati succeed and use their blog directory all the time personally, but these huge traffic numbers sure don’t result in much for me as a blogger.
It surprises me too, because I hear people consistently say they don’t like Technorati anymore, that it sucks, etc. I stopped using it a year ago.
Whenever I use Google’s blogsearch and sort by date (relevance isn’t always what I need when evaluating latest postings about something), I get too many splogs. Technorati seems to have a better handle on this in my particuar case.
I don’t understand why most people still use Technorati Tags. The benefit is mostly for Technorati. You can build your own tags and still be included in Technorati results:
http://www.apogee-web-consulti.....s-use.html
But, why give Technorati so many backlinks?
So why is this any different than Google indexing Digg:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ch-results
Or AboutUs or Mahalo.
All the same.
#24 Richard - most average bloggers don’t understand that fact.
I’d like ot see Google remove Local Business Results - I have not foudn them relevant in my experience.
@ Allen - I agree that it is the same. These things are symptoms of the what Google considers the problem: search results in search results. Should they remove Technorati results from their index, they would have to do that categorically.
This is a reason why I don’t think Google will pull the plug. As search engines such as Technorati, AboutUs or Mahalo gain mainstream adoption, Google will be under increasing pressure not to omit their results. This would be construed as omitting relevant results and would be considered too monopolistic by the community at large.
I would hardly put digg in the same category as technorati. First, I don’t remember the last time google sent me to a digg search results page. Secondly, each time google’s pointed me to digg, the digg story has streams of comments and thus original content.
That is hardly the same as a service that AUTO INDEXES other blogs.
#27 Zaid - yes, I agree about your last comment, but in reality, one can say that Digg just links back to the original content as well. And (not to get too far off track) but the original post should appear instead.
AboutUs/Mahalo is the same - even though Mr. Jason won’t admit to it - Mahalo is a SE play period. It’s interesting that Mike didn’t mention that at all in his post.
My company blog interviewed the VP of marketing for Technorati about how they are selling themselves. I think most of their success is sort of self-promotion more than actual value. Digg is a much better tool, it actually is a good representation of what is going on, not just an elaborate system of measuring links. I’ll stick with Digg.
If you want to check out the interview and judge for yourself. http://www.dssimonvlogviews.com/?cat=46
I’m not so sure Technorati will be at the top forever. I think their success can (in some part) be attributed to a combination of luck and timing. I do not believe their blog search engine technology is on the cutting-edge. They were simply first to market and are KNOWN as the industry leader. It’s all a matter of positioning and branding, rather than service offering.
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
I like this post. But it think tech would survive
I think much of the redesigns that Technorati has gone through over the past year were in part to address this issue; if you noticed, they went from a search results type of feel, to a more general content look, including more videos and photos. Google is concerned that the pages in their results add some value to the searcher, and more often than not, Technorati tag pages do.
In contrast, Google has tried to limit the amount of influence Technorati has in the tagging space by launching labels in their Blogger service. Labels are really just tags, with the one difference being that they link back to Google Blog Search results instead of Technorati. Wordpress.com has done something similar, creating aggregation pages of all Wordpress.com blogs for each tag page used. There really is no good reason why anyone should give their links away to Technorati; tags was probably one of the most successful SEO campaigns in history.
agree - not sure to what extent it can grow but it does have pole position….
No matter at all. Each service will be buyed, today or tomorrow.
Google could make or break a site like technorati that is still out of grasp of the general public.
Mmm…I tried Technorati and wasn’t too impressed. I am surprised Google is allowing this to carry on.
@ Allen, who said: “most average bloggers don’t understand that fact.” Yes, but many bloggers are also developers or work at companies who have developers. I certainly don’t understand why SEM bloggers use Technorati Tags.
@ Greg - Yes, it was (and still is) a brilliant SEO campaign.
I fail to see why Google should index other’s search. Also, regarding the ‘disallow’ note, whatever Google chooses to do with their algorithm, it seems that it is ethical that a company, which is showing a page full of search-links, should mention it clearly. Otherwise it is getting itself a free-ride.
Searches showing sales link (ama zon like) can be pretty irritating and I use the ‘-word’ feature of google search to remove unwanted sites.
Yeah I agree Mike Technorita and even Digg results in google are more like search results if you ask me, I think the people that desverve the best search result are from people that actuall write the content not from sites like technorita and Digg cashing in on other peoples work, what does everyone think?
When Will The Traffic Party End? - guess when the next big thing comes along
thanks for this.
The better question is: how do you mitigate against loosing Google’s favor?
Its already too late for them to fix it. Technorati probably got a bump in users that are going to come back to the site irregardless of whether or not its in Google.
It’s a good article.