Technorati 100 List Goes Bonkers

Posted on April 23, 2006

As of this writing Page Not Found from MSNBC.com is leading the Technorati 100 with 190,481 links from 54,206 sites. The other day Publishing 2.0 blogged that the Technorati 100 list was packed with Asian MSN Spaces blogs. Randy Morin offers the following explanation for the overabundance of MSN Spaces blogs in the Technorati 100.

The problem is that Technorati does not index blog entries, but rather webpages. Technorati often reports referrers to my own blogs where the blogger is simply listing me in his sidebar blogroll. Actually, it wouldn't be so bad if I got one referrer from that sidebar link, but Technorati will often repeatedly give me referrers every time that blogger writes a new entry. So, we have a big problem. Is MSN Spaces gaming the Technorati index? Guess what, they are not. MSN Spaces is marking these automated links with NOFOLLOW attributes, as they are suppose to. I then went to the Technorati 100 and checked if they were including links with this attribute and found out they were. Why is Technorati including NOFOLLOW links in their rankings?

Today some of those MSN Spaces blogs have been removed but the MSNBC's Page Not Found is still topping the charts. The temporarily confused Technorati ranking index thinks MSNBC is a blog.