A Pharmacy Blog, with almost no content except hidden links for selling Viagra, has managed to trick Technorati and is now the third most favorited blog in the world - more popular than TechCrunch, Lifehacker or even Engadget.
Not sure if they discovered some loopholes inside Technorati or manually added thousands of fake profiles to artificially increase their rank but it does suggest that Technorati is still prone to gaming.
Technorati Blog Page | Technorati Pop Chart
Find this article at:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/increasing-technorati-rank-by-adding-fake-profiles/2085/
web: http://www.labnol.org/
email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
My understanding of Technorati links (please correct if I’m wrong) is that you can generally get up to two authority points per blog link, one for a sidebar link, and one from content. The content link expires every six or so months, but I don’t believe the sidebar link times out that quickly, if at all. If you can squeeze more inbound authority points out of a blog, that might be a quick way to clandestinely improve your rank.
The methods other I’ve seen include setting up hundreds or more splogs that link only into one’s own site, then scraping one’s own content and/or partial feeds onto your own splogosphere, and running your content through language filters that change the syntax and vocabulary so the main site the splogs link back to isn’t necessarily penalized on Google.
I have the feeling there might be a program that does this kind of gaming automatically. I can also understand if you might not want to post this comment, as it might give people ideas.
#1 - written by asdf on 01.15.08
Noticed this last week and emailed them about it - not expecting them to get to my email in the customer service queue for a couple of months though :-)
#2 - written by Darren on 01.15.08