August 2009

Guest Post from Wolfgang Luenenbuerger, head of Digital, Edelman Europe

Wolfgang Luenenbuerger

I am not the only one who has been thinking about alternatives for Technorati to do blog monitoring and finding backlinks to blogs. For months Technorati’s performance has in my opinion, been going down.

Today the German researcher Jens Schröder , who is doing great work to put together weekly German Blog Charts (Top 100) not only explained in a (German) blogpost why he felt the same - but I also discovered a good alternative: Icerocket.

Here is - sorry for the bad English - my translation of the most
relevant parts of his post:

Until about two or three months ago, Technorati’s problems have
been not too bad. OK, the website was down from time to time, other problems complicated my work, but the database and the backlinks have been fine. … [Then] this changed dramatically. I often found myself asking if there was still anyone working there who was responsible for technology. … More recently, Technorati showed much fewer new backlinks. Reasons seem to be that some new blogs are not indexed (or at least displayed), manually pinging does not work anymore and some blogs are blocked.

Over the last couple of weeks backlinks have been even fewer. Popular blogs, that have been linked to during this time, did not get the honor they needed. If that was not enough - Technorati even closed down the support forum (and never responded on support mails or feedback through the website). …

This week it all became too much for me. I don’t know what they did exactly, but all blogs lost a lot of their “authority”, meaning backlinks. This was even the case for blogs that have not been online for six months, so something was wrong. I took samples from the database via API and it looks like Technorati lost parts of its database, so a lot of backlinks are just gone. Seeing this it was clear to me that I could not work with Technorati anymore. …

During the last couple of weeks I experimented with all existing free blog seach services and took big samples to check which one would deliver the best (for my purpose this means: most) results. Surprisingly for me this was Icerocket - a search engine that has been around for some years now but never really took off. But it’s really good: the number of backlinks, Icerocket finds, is at least from my research and samples far better than Blogpulse (#2), Twingly (#3), Technorati (only #4 now), and Google (#5). (Jens Schröder @ Popkulturjunkie, my own translation)

For me personally this was a surprise as well as it was the only blogsearch I did not use very often - but I will definitly give it a try now.

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David Brain: I have met Dave Siffry a couple of times and spent a pretty intense week with Peter Hirschberg travelling Edelman offices in Europe back in 2006, when we had the temerity to launch the first ever list of top blogs in each market together. They are genuinely both brilliant pioneers, but I have to say I have been scratching my head over the Technorati thing for a few months now. Is there an update guys?