Andy Beard - Niche Marketing

Technorati Changes From A Users Perspective
Technorati Changes From An Expert Perspective
What Is Quansite?

Technorati Changes From A Users Perspective

Posted: 14 Oct 2009 05:57 AM PDT

You didn’t think I would leave it at just my expert perspective on the Technorati changes did you?

As with my previous post I want to make clear that it is somewhat of a dilemma writing about Technorati, as I provide some infrequent consultation to Blogcatalog in some ways one of their competitors.

However as well as providing an expert’s overview of Technorati I have always been an avid user, so this is Technorati from a purely user’s perspective.

Technorati Favorites Are Gone

The Technorati Top 100 by number of favorites has gone, along with all the interfaces for managing and reading favorites.

Technorati Blog Reactions Are Gone

You used to be able to use Technorati to monitor a story, following links to related posts.

Technorati no longer has a page containing a large snippet of your content along with the related links to that content.

As a user of Technorati that is a major loss, and it was this relationship between posts that used to make technorati a core component of the WordPress interface.

This is a feature competition with Google has finally killed, but Google’s Blogsearch currently sucks, picking up comments even with nofollow, sidebar links etc. Monitoring links through Google is time consuming because of the noise.

Technorati Comments

You can now leave friendly comments on the profiles of the blogs you love, all through JS Kit (which means the blog owner has no way to moderate, just link Google Sidewiki)

Here is one I left on the Techcrunch profile pointing this out earlier

Technorati Articles

You can now write full articles to post on Technorati such as this one (chosen at random)

I think you are meant to reach these articles through the Technorati “People” navigation which isn’t currently working, but there are links to related articles at the bottom of Directory pages.

Technorati Directory

Top blogs in a small collection of topics plus the global “headline” Technorati top 1000

Humans are going to have difficulty navigating through more than a few pages, let alone search engines

You are really going to have to use blog based tags to find blogs similar to your own. Make sure you set them correctly for your own blogs.

Overall

Many of the features that were broken no longer exist, and the idea of reactions going away forever is sad. Hopefully it is a feature that will return.
I am not sure whether commenting will enhance the site – I know that contact systems on Mybloglog and Blogcatalog are prone to spam which a site owner can moderate. I can’t understand why they use JS-Kit.

Update

Technorati have now posted a list of changes from their perspective highlighting things like the ranked directories (though they have always had ranked tags)

There are even some slightly more technical features I didn’t spot as missing, but will eventually come back

What's gone for now?
With six years of history behind us, we have also discovered what's important and not important in our offerings. As such, some things will go away permanently, and others will return later with enhanced utility that reflects the new features of the site. Here's what's coming back shortly after launch:
* Technorati Charts and API: both will be returning later
* Widgets – For those sites with widgets on their sites, there's no need to worry. Some widgets will continue to serve as they have in the past, and some that utilized legacy Technorati technology will either change slightly or temporarily disappear without any affect on web pages. Technorati will be developing some exciting new widgets that match the new features in the site.
* s.technorati.com is still there, but it's moved to the main site at Technorati.com/search
* Watchlists are gone
* Some (but not all) RSS feeds.

They really should remove the noindex/nofollow from their blog header

Technorati Changes From An Expert Perspective

Posted: 14 Oct 2009 04:26 AM PDT

I am always in 2 minds to write anything about Technorati but ultimately the changes to the site today are extremely significant, and I had to balance that against my ability to offer suitable commentary.

This post covers the more technical changes to Technorati – I have also now posted about the changes to Technorati from a users perspective

Since I started advising Blogcatalog a little in private, writing about Technorati, Mybloglog or any other blog directory or search engine in some ways would be like writing about the competition. Celebrating the great things a competitor does would probably be acceptable, whereas writing something negative would be “dissing the competition”
This blog has always had in-depth coverage of blog search, blog social networks and blog related SEO, especially in regards to things like the benefits of semantic markup and tagging. Not writing something would leave a huge whole in my content and a disservice to my audience.

My choice is to write something, but understand that some might look on what I write as being a little biased. In my own mind I am a Technorati fan, so hopefully that will temper my reactions to some features.

I need to qualify the title of this post – I have spent countless days over the last 2-3 years studying changes the user interface, plus the internal and external SEO factors of all the large blogging platforms, social networks and search engines. Whilst my email exchanges with Blogcatalog are extremely infrequent, I am constantly monitoring for changes.

Technorati Relaunched Site

I first read about the upcoming Technorati changes on Venture Beat in an interview with Richard Jalichandra 10 days ago, and Richard also made the announcement on his blog.
There is an announcement on the Technorati blog as well – by the date of the post (8th Oct) they might have been almost ready to go live a week ago, but pulled the plug due to a hitch.

Techcrunch have coverage today and Technorati have also received an additional round of funding (well technically an extension of a previous round).

New Technorati Home Page

Technorati Rankings Changed

Technorati have a new ratings system which is based on factors I haven’t worked out yet – I am sure there is a lot of Twitter data in there as people don’t link very often these days in many niches, especially the SEO community (hint)
They are probably also pulling in 3rd party traffic data.

Techcrunch mention:-

Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and "other inputs."

It will be interesting how ranking tables such as Adage Power 150 or the Top IM Blogs include this data going forward.

Technorati Tag Pages

This is now approaching the nuts and bolts of Technorati

Lets first of all take a look at the tag page for SEO

The first immediate impression is that this is only a single page of results, there is no pagination and there is a comment box at the bottom of the page provided by JS Kit. That has just bumped the JS Kit installed based by several million pages. Technorati last had around 30 million indexed pages, though I am sure that will soon change.

If you look at your Google toolbar, Search Status or other SEO plugin, you might notice a TBPR (Toolbar Page Rank) for this page of 2. You would think with all the millions of times Technorati have no doubt been linked to for this term by people using Technorati as a default tag space (rel=”tag”) that it would be more than that – Google does seem to be discounting those links and has been for some time.

Almost all of the results are around 150 in the new Technorati Authority scale, and there are no recent SEO posts listed such as Powazek slamming SEO in general, and Danny Sullivan responding… twice.
For those wondering, I nofollowed Powazek because I don’t trust the source. Ranking for stuff due to the benefits of WordPress theme publishing really doesn’t count as SEO.

There is a short article at the top of the page from Blog Critics that has some great links for Michael Grey and SEOmoz.

The least obvious factor is that the tag pages no longer seem to be made up of editorially assigned tags from blog publishers, but is based upon a content search and possible relevance based upon keyword density. I suspect technorati are now using something like Sphinx to power their tag pages. They won’t be the first, and I am not saying this is the wrong approach, but it is a significant change that Technorati, effectively the king of rel=”tag” doesn’t really use it much any more.

As evidence there was a listing to this page virtualdownload.net/?p=59834 – it was not specifically tagged SEO, just used the term a lot promoting what seems to be a warez download.

No SEO tag used (click for more)

Technorati Search

If you just type in a search for a particular topic in Technorati now, it defaults to a search of Blogs on the topic, not recent content.

Rankings Based Upon Old technorati Authority?

I have a funny feeling these rankings are based upon the old Technorati scales in some way as can be seen in the numbers on the left hand side – it is not exactly the same, but there is a lot of similarity in the results.

The default blog post search again seems to to be keyword density based, so if you want to rank for SEO on Technorati, just mention SEO a lot.

If you then refine your search based upon high authority, the results actually seem pretty good, lots of web designers saying SEO is a load of crock, plus Danny defending SEO.

Then you delve into the results and discover:-

Just a snippet from the lead developer of Tumblr – a crap result
A paid post on Venture Beat that doesn’t use nofollows – a smart SEO company would actually want those links nofollowed, so I don’t feel like I am snitching.
Regurgitated Powazek
More regurgitated Powazek on Boing Boing

I don’t trust those results either, all nofollowed

What is wrong with SEO is search engine reliance on website authority to give meanings to results – these results are in my opinion crap, but search engines have to somehow unravel how bad quality all those referring sites are, as they are not topical authorities and just joining in on a web designer circle jerk. It will take a little time for Google to work that out, and I doubt the “fresh” result for Derek’s post will remain long on the front page of Google.

It should be noted that a large chunk of Derek Powazek’s “good code” has probably just been scrapped by Technorati.

I think the new Technorati shows some promise in its scaled down capacity – it is pretty and fairly functional though a number of the new components need a little work. I hope a chunk of Technorati’s new funding will be invested in hiring an SEO expert.

Disclaimer: I am not an SEO consultant – you can’t hire me on an hourly rate and those I advise almost always benefited from free advise long before there was any kind material compensation. I just study things intensely and rip them apart. I certainly couldn’t create many of the great web applications I write about without a lot of help from great web developers.

Tags: SEO Blog, tagging, technorati

What Is Quansite?

Posted: 13 Oct 2009 05:06 PM PDT

This is in many ways one of the most painful blog posts I could write, because it is about a service that is the closest anyone has come in 4 years to the “software as a service platform” I would like to create.

The business model is totally different but the front end seems to have many of the features and attention to detail that I would require, and to be honest much of what I want to achieve on the backend & network effect isn’t necessary for many business users.

If what I want to create is a lion, Quansite is a tiger – different animals, different prey – both killers and could probably co-exist.

Quansite is a WordPress based blogging platform for business, but calling it that is really doing it a bit of a disservice.

It is the kind of system that will take a huge bite out of the business of high-priced website development shops targeting small business, because so much is done for you.

Quansite Marketing Pro

There are a couple of WordPress themes I know of which can claim drag and drop, but they are not designed for creating sales pages & one-time offers, or “touch of a button” squeeze page creation.

Quansite Optimization

A lot of these features many might claim “I know a plugin that does that” but they are buggy or unsupported. Or you would have to pay for them, and purchased plugins you have to update by ftp etc.
If you like tinkering with things, fair enough, but it isn’t efficient use of your time as a business owner.

Quansite New Media

Quansite is by @coachdeb and @jpmicek – they know social media backwards – the real thing, and can teach it.

When everyone else anything to do with social media consulting was on a mass “follow everyone” drive, Coach Deb just kept on doing what she had always done, maintaining relationships.
Here is me, writing a blog post possibly about my most serious competitor, and I am doing it because of the relationship I have built with Coach Deb over the last year.

I don’t know the specifics of the modules, in some ways the video and audio “blasters” seem very similar to Traffic Geyser and could be some kind of white label – they are limited by credits for all but the highest level packages.

Quansite Backend

Trying to translate from “marketing speak” into more geeky terms, it seems like they might have a CDN integrated… looking at their own site this is through SimpleCDN, though I don’t know if it is their S3Plus service, or as a Highwinds reseller.
I can’t quite work out “server ring” – some kind of clustering maybe using memcached but don’t count on that.

Solid backups and security – I know geeks can do this stuff, but webdev shops charge small businesses $X’000 for this stuff.

I am not going to spy on my ~~competitors~~ friend’s proprietary stuff, though to be honest it is so tempting just to abandon goals and get on with just using technology to make money – I could make a lot of money just using Quansite.

Take a look, they have for a limited time an introductory offer for all the main packages of just $9.97 for the first month

It is still shared hosting, even on their most expensive plans, but I doubt the servers will be oversold and all sites are using a CDN which makes a huge difference, especially if they are also doing some decent caching.

I am not going to review it in-depth for a number of reasons

I haven’t seen anything that would stop me spending less than $10 to check it out for myself
It wouldn’t be right for me to pay the $10 just to snoop with no intention of staying around – I still have my unfulfilled plans (who knows they may never happen)
They have been running this platform for a while now under the brand i360 and I have never seen any critical reviews
How could anyone say anything bad about @coachdeb? The training is probably worth more than she is charging for the whole package.

I have no idea if every aspect is as optimized as I might want it to be, but I am sure it fulfils the 80:20 rule

I am not sure what additional limitations that places on things like design.

Warning: This is a NO TECH solution – you don’t even get FTP access, they say there is no need.

For anyone who isn’t a geek, that is actually a good thing, they can concentrate on marketing and making money.

Disclosure: I should just tell you to read my disclosure policy but I have included affiliate links in this post.

Tags: Quansite, wordpress