It saddens me to announce that the Villager's Black Blog Rankings (BBR) is officially closing down. The recent changes announced by Technorati make it impossible for me to continue with this volunteer ranking effort. I think that the changes Technorati made are good and needed. However, they have eliminated my ability to continue researching the talented blogs owned and operated by people of African descent.BBR was based on Technorati Authority numbers. Technorati changed the process used to determine this metric. Technorati's intention is to measure the influence and attention received on an ongoing basis ... as such they stopped counting static blogroll links, and these links have now aged out of the authority calculations.
Due to the vast number of blogging platforms and custom installations out there (and some bloggers who felt they were using too much of their data), Technorati Authority now rely more heavily on RSS and Atom feeds than in the past. Bloggers can control how much of their content they wish to syndicate via feeds. Many blogs only provide partial feeds ... Technorati is not always able to get link data from them. Thus, links from these blogs may no longer contribute to your authority.
Finally, it is important that bloggers ensure that Technorati knows about your blog updates by using the new Ping Page, or learn about configuring your system to ping Technorati automatically on their Help Page. Many blogging services and platforms have a preconfigured option for pinging Technorati and other services.
If you find links to your blog that don't appear on Technorati, you may want to check that the other blog:
- is claimed on Technorati
- has a full-content feed
- is pinging us with updates
wide variety of topics. I hope that we're able to continue to find ways to support one another.For now ... it would be wonderful to hear from those of you that have followed the Black Blog Rankings over the past months. What are your final thoughts on the BBR?
