In the previous post (Technorati rank & authority dropping like the stock market) I mentioned the acute overnight drop of my Technorati Authority from ~46 to 5 and the loss of many backlinks.
Here I suggested that this dropping in authority might be connected to the loss of Google backlinks.
From the Technorati discussion forum it is apparent that many other bloggers are having similar problems: the loss of blog reactions and thus “authority”.
Going through some of those discussion, I found that answers of the administrator gave a clue to the cause of the vanishing pings.
In the discussion string http://support.technorati.com/discussions/topic/4655 the administrator wrote on October 17, 22 and 28 respectively (see Figure):
[Note the different insight over time and the light hearted tone:
” Hello all, we did a bit of spam cleaning over the weekend…” ]
Here is the integral text of the Technorati blogpost.
“Technorati has a number of initiatives in the works to improve the data in our search indexes and analytics systems. Web spam sites (splogs) have long been an issue that we’ve been working to address. The days when pings came only from legitimate blogs are long gone. Including all of the spam and duplicates, Technorati receives over 8 million pings per day. Over 90% are recognized and blocked as soon as they’re received. The remainder is allowed into the system and selectively processed – a large portion is determined to be spam later.
Recently, we’ve been focusing on link farms and pornography sites that have been getting into the system. Link farms are networks of sites linking to each other and other sites with the intention of raising search rankings. Sometimes, these sites link to legitimate blogs to “camouflage” these intentions or simply because the content has been stolen from another site. During a recent scrub of the system, a number of legitimate blogs were misidentified as spam. The flags set on those blogs were reversed, so going forward they are being indexed correctly again. However, some of the link and post data scrubbed from our search and analytics systems could not be reverted. We’re working on upgrades to make that data handling better managed but in the meantime, there are some gaps in certain blog’s data which may affect the authority of blogs they linked to. Additionally, some blogs suffered authority drops due to being the beneficiary of camouflaged links from spam sites being removed (wittingly or not); when those spam sites were removed, so was a portion of the authority of the legitimate blogs they linked to.
We have a number of technology initiatives in the works to improve the scaling characteristics and data quality of our systems. More news will be arriving on that in the weeks and months ahead.
Indeed this explains a lot. As I wrote in previous posts ( Blog Spam and Spam Blogs 1 (see here) and 2 (see here)) many splogs have linked to my blog and much of my content has been and is being stolen by such blogs!!
So I’m punished twice and hard for writing about health related issues (the desired niche for spamblogs selling cialis, viagra and those kind of drugs).
Once by blogs stealing my content and ending up high in ranking (see comment of Wowter and Keith Nockels here) and once by Technorati finally cleaning up those spamming blogs in a rigorous way, dragging me along in their slipstream!
Thanks Technorati! For shooting holes in my ranking, not responding to my mail and not adequately helping those who are hit by your rucksichtloss (excellent German term for what has been done, something like recklessly in English) weeding of the spam blogs that you’ve allowed to exist in Technorati for years! (see this critic in Wikipedia mentioned in my previous post).
Technorati, what are you going to do about it?
Laika's MedLibLog 
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