There was a time in the blogosphere when page rank and Techorati ratings were based on how much back links you can gather among peers. If your blog gets 1000 links, your PR goes up and so does your Technorati Authority rating. I found this to be true because I participated in the first ever viral linking posts out there. I saw my blog rating jump from PR of ZERO to PR of FOUR, and Technorati Authority jump from 20 to over 1800. All this, without doing anything except the fact that I was invited to the Viral Link project much much earlier in the game and my blog sites’ URL were included in the list when the fever caught on. I had six blogs of which 5 had a PR of 3 and one with a PR of 4. I was trigger happy. PPP opportunities were unlimited and we were in heaven.

That was before Technorati and Google changed their ways in rating back links. Now, the rules have changed. According to TechCrunch, Technorati changed their algorithms not only on the linking sense of blogs but the ratings of blogs altogether. All types of sites are now incorporated to the mix as far as ratings go and not blog-centric. Another reason for this revamp was due to a bug that was discovered where the link counts are being added to the main domain from its subdomains. Meaning, if you have a blog under the progobbler.net domain and underneath it was a subdomain (subdomain.progobbler.net), the link to the subdomain is being counted as an extra link to the main domain therefore inflating your site’s rating.

“Technorati Authority is a calculation of how much attention is being paid to a blog and the posts beneath it, we do not include sub-domains. Sub-domains are treated as separate entitities and often are references to tools, utilities, features, and other non-blog resources.”

That has caused a severe decline in Technorati ratings for many sites and rightfully so, because it is just fair to only count the links to the main domain and the posts underneath the domain. Our Technorati rating on one of our blogs declined from 1800 to 200 over a period of time.

But that is not all. Ratings are usually measured by Google in ways of how relevant the links are to your site. If you have a healthcare centered blog and you have a link from a celebrity blog for arguments sake, it will not count as much. However, if you have a link coming from a hospital website pointing to valuable information on your blog, that would have a higher link rate than the former.

When you participate in a Viral Linking scheme, you may be attached to links which are irrelevant to your blog. It may temporarily increase your Technorati rating but the Google PR may not be affected as much. With this issue comes another one as well. If your blog is a family-friendly or ‘wholesome’ blog, down the line when the virus of links spreads, your blog may be exposed to links which may not be good for family-friendly blogs such as adult sites and over 18 blogs. You wouldn’t want to compromise your readers in this situation would you?

Viral linking has similar to some networking sites has a horrible click-thru rate. It provides a higher bounce rate than ACTUAL and RELEVANT links to your blog. If the incoming link is a relevant blog, chances are that people who read those blogs are interested in the subject matter of their blog and would travel over to yours to read a related topic. This would provide a better reason for readers to stay and read your posts other than a link that has no relation to your site as well.

Viral linking could also hurt your SERP (A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.) The absence of your blog’s relevance to other sites linking to yours may be so different that a query on the keywords you maintain on your blog may be construed as something else if the link is irrelevant and out-of-topic.

Also remember that your links must be authentic, relevant and within 6 months old. Technorati drops the value of any links to your site that is older than six months. Should you participate in Viral Linking, your rating may go up but by the time it reaches it’s peak (usually 4-6 months), the rest of the incoming links will be ignored and therefore would lower your rank anyway.

I’ve also read the Google does frown on viral linking as well. If they managed to strip our blogs of Page Ranks, it could only be because of two reasons or both. Participation in Viral Linking, or participation in Paid Posts.

Regardless, if you wish to climb the Google PR ladder or the Technorati stairway to heaven, we would recommend that you gather links that are relevant to your site / blog. In this way, you get to keep your rating without the possible consequences in the end.

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