A note for other bloggers re Technorati numbers

I've been tracking my Technorati authority and the associated "blog reactions" data and TYWKIWDBI's national ranking for about the past year. As expected, the numbers were gradually rising - then something unusual happened. Last month the "authority" took a precipitous fall. In the space of one day (July 30-31), the number fell by over 30. On the same day the number of "blog reactions" (citations) fell by over 100.

This was totally unexpected, and illogical because there had been no corresponding jump upward six months ago. Earlier this week the number rose by 15, so that it's now back to where it was in the spring. I assumed that either there was a glitch in their new computers, or that Technorati was altering their database, perhaps deleting the "citations" generated by bots that cruise the web.

Confirmation came this weekend when I found this note at the Technorati blog:

About six months ago, we started shifting large numbers of blogs over to our new crawler starting in February and finishing things up in March. The new crawler brought many advantages, among them is that it does a much better job of focusing on post contents. As part of the switch, we intentionally stopped indexing links outside of posts, including blogroll links, which don’t signify the relevance of an author’s intent to link to specific content. Technorati is tracking what is being actively discussed in the blogosphere; a static link doesn't tell us if there's anything of particular interest there right now. This change is now showing up in Technorati Authority numbers. As the blogroll links indexed by the old spider age past 180 days, they are no longer included in Authority calculations. We expect Authority numbers to continue to drop for the next 5-6 weeks until the last of the blogroll links age past 180 days. The resulting Authority numbers will be lower than they were last month, but will be a better indicator of how much attention a blog is actively receiving...

As a further heads-up, we’re currently working on a new Authority Rank algorithm for launch later this year. This new algorithm will represent a fairly significant change, but also one that more closely represents the live web of today...

... there was a system failure early last week that caused Authority numbers to drop; we have recovered that data and the current Authority numbers are correct. If we've indexed a post of yours in the past few days, then you should be seeing your full authority.