Well, Lauren hit the nail on the head. And he raises a point that I didn’t want to get into. But now I guess I’ll have to

It all started more than a year ago. Actually the first blogger I’m aware of that brought this to light is Randfish, from Seomoz. More than a year ago, in a blog post titled Lord of Yahoo!’s Short Tail Rand described how Technorati Tag Pages are enjoying excellent rankings on Yahoo’s Serps.

Well someone from Yahoo must have been reading his blog because it appears that finally got fixed.

But as we know the SEO world never seizes to amaze us. And guess who was the next search engine to bite. Nope, not Google. But the one we can’t live without. The Blogspot Lover. The one and only, MSN. Ahem, Live.com I mean.

It is actually pretty funny. Here’s just a few examples of short tail keywords you could be ranking for on Live.com just for tagging technorati:

• Humor: #1
• Media: #5
• Marketing: #3
• mp3: #6

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It’s insane. How come Live.com think that a technorati tag page is a relevant result for such keywords? Why does it fall for the trap? Simply because a huge amount of bloggers keep linking to these pages with the right keyword. What does this tell us? That Live.com is all about volume of links. Get a truckload of links pointing to you and you’ll rank for anything.

Let’s move on to Google. Does it fall in this trap? Not as bad, no. For keywords such as Humor, Media and Marketing, Google may acknowledge that Technorati has pages that are target of thousands, maybe millions of links with the right keyword. But thanks to algorithms that the SEO community refers to as Trustrank, Google is able to avoid this nasty Technorati Bait.

True, Google falls for another bait, which is The Wikipedia Bait. But that’s wood for another fire.

However. Google does fall a little on the Technorati Bait. When and how? Well, I looked at this carefully. And this what I found. Google ranks high a Technorati Tag Page when a new word or word phrase takes over the blogosphere. Thousands of blogs are suddenly linking to Technorati with the keyword in the anchor text and there’s virtually no competition for the keyword yet. So it’s an easy win for Technorati.

If this keyword is picked up by the blogosphere on a long term basis, then the technorati pages will fall down the serps to make room for other more trusted sources. Good examples of this are Web 2.0 related keywords, such as:

• Facebook
• Friendster
• Yahoomail
• Myspace
• Orkut
• Pownce
• Youtube
• Utube
• Twitter

Technorati was enjoying Top 10 results on all of these keywords at one point in time. Then other more trusted domains kept building authority on these keywords and pushed Technorati away. There’s still one example I could see today, where Technorati is still hanging in there:

• Skyblog

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If the keyword in question starts losing popularity and bloggers stop writing about it. Then Google will keep Technorati in the serps. When do this happen? Celebrity and Political Scandals.

Same principle applies. I’m not talking about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. Those are established keyword markets with lots of search activity in which trusted domains have claimed their share. I’m talking about B or C class celebrities (many of them from reality shows or outside US) that suddenly grow in popularity because of some scandal. Most often some sex tape. Examples:

• Wanda Nara
• Antonella Barba

Same principle applies to political characters. Think Ron Paul and the likes.

Bottom line? Technorati can be used as a doorway to grab a chunk of the traffic that it’s receiving because of its ridiculous rankings in Live.com. Google also falls for this trap, but not as bad.

Lately, Latin Celebrities have been hitting the Technorati Charts for a few weeks in a row. Noelia, Galilea Montijo, Johanna Cardona and the new Babe in the Block: Wanda Nara:

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The topic of today, as the headline mildly suggests is the following: I think Technorati is Fucked Up. This is why:

Have a look at the Top Searches List, you can see aforementioned Wanda Nara and Noelia are the most searched terms at this very moment. See below:

Now, with this information being freely available to anyone, what topic do you think webmasters are going to blog about? (if they want to receive any traffic that is) Yes, you guessed right: Webmasters are likely to blog about Wanda Nara, Noelia and Youtube, for example. If they do, and they tag their pages correctly, they are going to have their websites listed in Technorati tag pages, as described here.

So what do you expect to see when you visit the technorati tag page of any of these most searched for terms? (therefore likely most blogged about) That’s right, a lot of posts, and most likely pushing each other out from the tag page in matters of minutes!

But when you actually go and look at Technorati, what do you see? Let’s see:

Shit, last post about Wanda Nara (most searched term in the Blogosphere according to Technorati) was 3 days ago. Amazing. Let’s keep looking:

Last post about Noelia (second most searched term in the Blogosphere according to Technorati) was 4 hours ago. Let’s look at one more:

Last post about YouTube (third most searched term in the Blogosphere according to Technorati) was 4 hours ago.

Yep… no blogger, in the whole world, blogged about YouTube in the last 4 hours and tagged his post correctly. Nor they did about Noelia, or Wanda Nara in the last three days, even if she is the most searched term in the blogosphere because of a lousy blowjob home made tape.

We could also give shit to Technorati for all the non relevant posts and porn spamming going around. But let’s do that another day.

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UPDATE: It hasn’t been more than two hours since I published this post. I was checking back on Technorati, hoping to see some improvement taking place, and I came across this:

So now Favorites and WTFs are not working anymore. Cool

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