2000 Bloggers - Link Farm?

4 Comments February 7, 2007 2101 Views

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Recently I joined a project called the 2000 Bloggers. Tino Buntic was the person behind this project. The purpose of his brain child was to gather 2000 Blogger’s photos into one page, creating a montage. The only requirements to join the list was a blog url and photo of the blog author. Tino never asked or required others to link back or post the 2000 Bloggers into their own pages or blogs. Me, I did it on my own. I thought it would be cool to have those blogger’s montage on my blog. I volunteered to provide the code to others who wanted to display it on pages all for good, clean fun.

I just found out today that Tino has discontinued the project. He also took down the page that displayed the 2000 Bloggers. The reason? Because several bloggers are crying “foul” and stating that Tino’s project was a chain blog, spam blog or link farm. How can they accuse Tino of that? They didn’t even know what his real intentions were. However, Technorati also has viewed this as a negative effect on Technorati rankings turning them upside-down.

We’re listening to these concerns. In the same manner in which we decline to index blogs that don’t meet our quality criteria (AKA “splogs”), we’re loath to indulge these “chain posts” (”pain chosts”, ouch). Your voice is the most important one in the blogosphere’s distributed conversation. 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.

We hope these changes and many others that we have cooking will help you tap into the blogosphere to find the conversations, information and people you’re looking for.

I’m sure Tino Buntic never meant it this way. I’m sure his intentions were good. I admit that this thing did boost my Technorati rankings and also others who joined it. But if indeed the Technorati ranks were affected, I’m sure in a month’s time all would be filtered out and be back to it’s previous state.

I also can’t blame Technorati if they view it this way. They are also trying to protect the integrity of their ranking system. Technorati is known to be spam-proof and I guess this is one way of preventing future problems by preventing chain blogs or splogs (spam blogs) from taking over Technorati.

So is the 2000 Bloggers project a chain blog? a splog? a link farm? Maybe, maybe not. Others can say it is, others say it’s not. But it wasn’t intended to be that way. It wasn’t intended to game Technorati or Google. I think it just got out of hand and that Tino didn’t foresee any of these issues coming up. Too bad coz it was a really good idea. Good luck Tino, we’re waiting for your next big idea!