Blogrolls and technorati, search and authority

Image via CrunchBase

To make my site cleaner, I  now just provided links to my bookmarks tags stored on del.icio.us.  I have never really found a site via anyone’s else’s link list or blogroll, either I find it by search or by reading a post of a blogger I follow (or that I have found through search)  that provides a link I think worth pursuing.

Backlinks

Now a problem with Blogger is that it’s backlinks do not work very well (yes, db0 don’t say 'I told you so!' , Word Press's back links are better than Blogger’s, no argument there). Blogger relies on Google's Blog Search which is meant to have indexed 95 million blogs but leaves out some significantly bigger bogs (well bigger than mine) such as Richard Wiseman's or Tom Morris's hence I did not see either of their  backlinks to my posts (I found these by reading their blogs).

Readership

Now whilst I am not particularly interested in growing my readership - if you are interested in what I write, then please read, if not, then don’t - I am still interested in who is linking to me - this might be another way to find sites that I might, reciprocally, of interest to me, as well as keeping track of what is being said about my posts or me.

Blogrolls and Technorati

However I have signed on to mojoey of deep thoughts' atheist blogroll and as a result I get, relative to my needs stated above please note, "noise" from all those sites with my site listed in this blogroll. Now, since technorati has decided to ignore these for it’s authority rating, blogger’s have taken to posting the whole list every few months to keep their authority up. I am sorry but this is all bullshit. It is entirely artificial and I think technorati was quite correct to ignore these (and similar - there are many) types of lists.

Search Engine Optimisation

Now I do know that for SEO one needs more links to one’s site and this will increase your google page ranking. I do not know if google filters out these blogrolls as technorati does, but if not it surely soon will? 

Blog Search and feed aggregators

So what is the point? Why does anyone care about artificially high technorati authority rankings? Again only to get place higher with tag searches on technorati?  Well you should be more worried about google blog search, more blog searches are now done on this and than on technorati and as noted above there are other issues there (e.g. sporadic coverage of blogs). Well there is one incredibly useful spin off from the atheist blogroll. It is a great way to create a custom search (see my right hand sidebar  panel "Special Searches"). Thanks to Larro for creating this  community search engine. Now this, in my view, is a great way to use the atheist blogroll and I have found useful sites through this.  This and feed aggregators such as Planet Atheism or Atheist Blogs (which also has a custom search and easier to customize than the Atheist Blogroll Search Engine - also in my "Special Searches" section) are great resources.

recommendations

Stop posting long lists of links as posts, it will fail sooner or later with all the search engines.

Post links to sites that you are actually  blogging about and only within those posts (there they will get acknowledged by technorati and search engines).

Stop creating noise which prevents any blogger from seeing who is really linking to their site. Stop worrying about low technorati authority - no-one really cares (unless you are a Pro Blogger of course). 

I do want to remain part of this blogroll and will continue to promote atheist blogoll but only putting the search box on my site (and a link of course) but not by either: generating artificial links to sites I do not read nor , in my case, the logo - since it doe not fit in with the aesthetic of that section. (If mojoey or others has a problem with this, well that is what the comments are for).

The atheist blogroll is still a fantastic resource for searches, why not evolve and make this it’s main feature?