The Atheist Blogger

Db0 from A Division by Zero is intrigued by all the atheist blogs that are hosted on free services like blogspot, wordpress.org, livejournal, etc. He has set up a poll over at his website to find out why so many people use these free websites instead of having complete control with a hosted account. Of course, this isn’t just a poll to find out statistics.

Now rest assured that there is a method to the madness . I am not just doing it for my own amusement but I will actually utilise the results I get for your benefit.  I will reveal the how and why in one week, once I have (hopefully) enough answers.

If you fall into the group of bloggers who are using free services, go and vote now!

A few days ago, some atheist bloggers started posting the entire Atheist Blogroll (as links) in a single post. I don’t know how it happened or whose idea it was, but I think I can safely say that the person behind it probably thought they were starting some trendy phase. Certainly they were not thinking about the ramifications of linking to over 700 blogs in a single page.

In the end, db0 wrote 6 reasons why you really shouldn’t mess around like this and as far as I can tell, people have stopped.

The damage may have already been done though. My technorati authority dropped massively overnight from 95 to 76, whilst Friendly Atheist went down from around 750 (at my last check) to 669. These are the only two blogs I can say for certain that have dropped. The lack of a technorati authority history page means that researching this is next to impossible.

I can only assume that people who actually have blogs and check their authority regularly will be able to tell if it is going up or down. It may be a legitimate fall I’ve seen, but I honestly can’t see how such large drops could possibly have occured simply overnight. I would guess that it is Technorati rejecting a load of incoming links and in doing so affecting some previous recorded links that contribute to authorities.

Has anyone else seen evidence of this? Has your blog authority gone down suddenly in the last few days? It’s not like I care that much about technorati authority, but it would provide an explanation for the sudden drop.