Technorati vs. Blogged vs. Zimbio - The Verdict

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Several months have passed since I signed up to Technorati, Blogged, and Zimbio. Of interest was seeing whether these sites could help increase traffic to this website. A week after signing up, I noted that Technorati was the only one to produce any hits. Now, months later, which one was the most effective? Which one is the "winner?" That title goes to Technorati. However, my initial skepticism has also been proven right; even Technorati has failed to produce much more than a handful of visits.

Technorati provides a means to see who cross-links to a particular blog. The idea is to encourage dialog. It also shows posts from the higher ranking blogs on its front page. Unfortunately, this means that newcomers with a" Technorati Authority" (a measure of how many other bloggers have linked to a blog) of zero are at a serious disadvantage. Thus, aggressive cross-linking is required, something that I lack the time for. Also, since most blogs are gossip/news related, there are few blogs that would be relevant to cross-link to. Cross-linking also does not guarantee that anyone will reciprocate and link to your blog. Additionally, Technorati seems to suffer from periodic technical problems.

Blogged initially looked promising since a human is responsible for reviewing blogs and giving them a rating. However, if a blog is given a rating below ten (i.e, below maximum), then it will never feature on the front page. and, the chance of someone noticing the will be very very slim. Blogged quickly lost my attention as it did little more than mirror the RSS feed from this website.

Zimbio looks like a site that essentially tricks other people into letting it use content from their blogs in order to bring in advertising revenue. It is possible that other blogs do, in fact, receive traffic from Zimbio. However, this has not been the case for me. There is little incentive for a reader on Zimbio to click through to a website since the entire article is posted there. To make matters worse, Zimbio references images directly from the source blog, so that it waste's the blog's bandwidth instead of their own. Additionally, there was no active Zimbio "WikiZine" that caters toward this blog; the entire front page was plastered with celebrity gossip. Clearly, those who would be interested in this blog are not likely to be searching Zimbio.

There were a few common problems with all these websites. Firstly, the vast majority of blogs on those sites appear to focus on celebrity gossip, politics and/or news. This blog is seriously out of place in that environment. Secondly, the most popular "blogs" have multiple people posting articles. It is easy to increase ones Technorati authority if you are The Huffington Post, Gizmodo or Make. Essentially, it is very hard work for a blog run by a single individual to gain much attention. I simply do not have the time, or the desire, to spend on blogging. There are more important things to do. 

Despite the low number of visits, I will continue to use Technorati. Knowing who is linking to your website is interesting, and overall, I like the service that is provided. This blog's account on Blogged has been unused for months now, and will likely stay that way. My Zimbio account has been set to stop republishing entries from this blog. 

Comments (0) | 17 October 2008