smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Ed Kholer over at Technology Evangelist writes:

“It doesn’t take long to figure out that a blog’s ranking is directly tied to the number of links and unique sites that link back to the blog… Knowing that, what can be done to make your site rank higher? The most obvious strategy is to create interesting content on your site that’s worth linking to. Great. But what should you do when Technorati doesn’t register the hard earned links you’ve earned?”

A great little article on helping Technorati to help itself (and others, by proxy). Ed goes on to suggest “pinging” technorati on behalf of a linkee to your blog is a good idea. There are, however, a couple of points I would like to make on this, particularly as I believe it’s a flawed idea. Why? Read on..

The problem isn’t just specific to a lack of “ping”. Many blog engines (including Wordpress) are actually pre-configured to update ping-o-matic on post creation, which in turn proceeds to update a great many services, including Technorati’s ping service.

Technorati also “walks” pages to identify links. Many blogger’s decided to embrace Google’s rel=nofollow URI tag in an effort to combat spam, which will effect the way bot’s walk pages and index sites. That’s a good thing when dealing with spam robots, but a very bad thing when content engines such as Technorati and Google take a stroll through the HTML.

Thus rel=nofollow can and does (history for linkage for my site shows a massive decline right around the time “nofollow” became the latest thing all the cool kids were doing) impact linkage across blogs and content engines such as Google and Technorati.

Removing nofollow and beefing up spam prevention will lead to better results, for all pro-blogger content services (and not just Technorati). The ideal is to encourage linkage across blogs and discourage spam, not discourage linkage and ignore spam. Make sense? Excellent!

This is only half the story however. Ed’s concept is to submit incoming links, by proxy. That is, if someone has sent a ping or trackback through to you, but Tecnorati hasn’t obtained a record (due to either a lack of ping, or nofollow) of said link, one would then fill in the Technorati ping form on their behalf.

In a word. Don’t. It’s a concept that sounds great in innocent theory, but is a very bad idea in practice.

You are doing nothing more than artificially inflating your rank on Technorati (even if you beleive the link should be in Technorati, is entriely irrelevant). Half the reason Google introduced nofollow, was in response to that very same concept. It’s “gaming” the system to your betterment, which is not even remotely ethical or advisable no matter how innocently you might believe it is.

Here’s the likely outcomes of trying the above:

• you may find yourself in hot water for attempting to “game” Technorati
• you may find yourself blocked (no linky linky for you)
• you are making a fellow bloggers decision for them, possibly without their knowledge
• you are artificially inflating Technorati’s data, which then distorts on everyone else’s
• may be a breach of the Technorati terms of service

Solution?

It’s amazing simple. Ask the incoming link author to ping Technorati, or add the ping service to their blogging configuration. No mater how innocent the idea behind Ed’s post may be, it’s the very reason such linkage destroying, content busting, ping breaking, desperate methodologies such as rel=nofollow came into being.

So, how do you add Technorati (or check that it’s already being pinged)? Easy - just add http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to your blog’s configuration (for Wordpress, it’s under Options > Writing). If it’s already there, then great, your good to go.