A link scheme designed to game the rankings at sites like blog tracker Technorati, along with other search sites, received a swift kick in the routers from the Technorati crew.
On Technorati’s new Where’s The Fire feature, a few bloggers describe the now-offline image and link mosaic that had been promoted by Tino Buntic as a way to link together 2000 bloggers, hence the name.
The initiative picked up a lot of buzz, some of which was pretty negative. Technorati took a dim view of the project, and their Ian Kallen posted about the blog search site’s response:
To dissuade chain posts from submerging your voice in their dilutative effects, we’ve updated our indexing systems on an experimental basis to filter out links of this nature. We all love photo collages of faces; we’ve had them, albeit on a smaller scale, on the Technorati site since last summer. However, “join us and use these links” memes such as 2000 Bloggers is really a disservice to rank measurement systems and thus this decision to change our indexing policies in that regard.
Translation: nice try, but the large gentlemen working door security at Technorati have taken the 2000 Bloggers effort and tossed it to the curb.
Buntic responded to that in a brief blog post. “I guess Technorati is upset with me. That doesn’t feel good, now,” he wrote. “Anyway, I got about 1700 on my collage. I don’t even know if I should finish it. I’ll take down the code to repost it.
Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests discussed why this was a misguided idea:
What’s the big deal? It inflates your link “worth” so to speak. As Webomatic mentions – its basically a linkfarm in new clothes. Imagine you’re a new blog with a few dozen inbound links, and then you’re flooded with almost 2000 of them. Bongo bonanza!
Although the intentions may have been good, it would be difficult for any engine that weights blogs by inbound links to tolerate this for very long. The practice of bloggers linking to each other won’t end, they will just have to do so without using shortcuts to get a bunch of links in one move.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
