Technorati - Gaming the System (unintentionally!)
Posted by Neil Crosby on November 26, 2006 06:00 PM
A little while ago, it came to my attention that my little site is ranked quite highly on Technorati. At the time of writing, it’s apparently ranked 1753 out of god only knows how many blogs in the world (up 600 places since I first found out about this in October). Frankly, when I saw myself with a ranking that high I was flabberghasted, and more than a little suspicious that something had gone wrong somewhere. So I set out to investigate…
I already knew that a fair number of people would be linking to me because of my mod_rewrite examples and Standardista Table Sorting articles but I really didn’t think that links to those would account for the 891 blogs that were linking to me. So, I dug deeper.
As I clicked through the lists of sites that were allegedly linking to me I became confused. Not many of them seemed to be! However, a lot of them did have something in common - they seemed to be using the same WordPress template. Following up on that revealed that the default installation of the Mesozoic template for WordPress (apparently the fifth most downloaded WordPress template) includes a link through to the Table Free pages on this site. These pages include a couple of code snippets to let you say that the design of your site is “table free”, and provide a link back to me. The author of the Mesozoic template used one of the snippets, his template got popular and I got a load of links back.
So, that’s how I came to have such a ridiculously high Technorati ranking (compared to what actually goes on here at the site) - I wrote a couple of pages worth of information that could be linked to along with other “validation buttons” and someone decided to link to me from a popular template. Simple really!
Now, why don’t I go start writing some actually useful content…