Looking at one's Technorati ranking frequently is well-known symptom of "Egotistical Blogger Syndrome" or EBS, for short. Comics have been made about bloggers needing to get their Technorati ranking fix, and others, like Guy Kawasaki, have made very public campaigns about their quest to reach the top 100. But for me, a small speck in the blogosphere, I don't see that my numbers add up, as Technorati's database often loads slowly, loses items and simply doesn't project consistency.For more than a year now, we've dabbled in this blog, and while it does cover technology news, sports buzz and the occasional political rant, it is by and large a personal blog. For much of the time, it's gone largely unnoticed. More recently, some of my observations around Google Reader, Digg and timing for blog posts have gotten a wider audience, sending more readers my way, more frequent comments, and, best of all, some external links. After the weekend's activity, which saw links from Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble, among others, today we landed on TechMeme again for our comments on Digg reaching 1 million users, and the well-respected Mathew Ingram noted the post on his blog and in a follow-up for WebProNews.
Yet, for some reason, as Technorati tries to tally the external links to my blog from others, the needle doesn't move. In fact, in some weird blip, many of the weekend's links were erased from my blog's summary page on the site over the last two days, and as more links came in today, both my ranking and the total number of external links stayed the same. So, if I were the obsessive type with EBS, and I were to value myself by my low-low Technorati ranking, I could potentially get annoyed.
Is it a database refresh issue, in that Technorati will update the ranking every 8 hours, or 24 hours? And if it were, at what time would that happen? And should I expect those external links that were there a few days ago to ever come back, or is that data lost? Is that why my ranking is staying static, even as more blogs point my way? I wonder if I will ever know.