What exactly is Technorati Authority and how the heck does it help me?  Technorati has it’s own ranking system called “Authority” which measures the visibilty and exposure of your blog.  It does this by both your backlinks and the authority of the sites that are linking to you.

The question then becomes:  Which is better;

Having 100 highly ranked blogs backlinking to you or;
Having 1000 no-so-highly ranked blogs providing backlinks

Quantity vs quality will often win out, and there are a few reasons for this.

1.  There are tons of blogs, with tons of posts out there that Technorati doesn’t know about.  When they get pinged for a new post, it’s also new content for Technorati and they’ll recognize that there’s a link pointing to your blog.

2.  When you have backlinks from very popular sites, it’s often difficult to get Technorati to view the link as they don’t see the post on that blog as new content.

The first thing to do to ensure that your blog is building Authority is to claim your blog.  All you have to do is visit www.technorati.com and join for free.  After you sign up you will be able to claim your blog which will then activate your Technorati Authority.  Blogs that aren’t claimed won’t have any Authority.  Technorati also provides you with a widget for your blog that is easy to copy and paste into your sidebar.

No Follow vs Do Follow

No follow links were first developed by Google as a way to control spam links on blogs.  By adding the no follow tag to links, blog publishers were provided a tool to prevent spammers from posting endless garbage comments simply to get a free back link to a site that you might not want to be associated with.

The blog spam problem at the time was a valid concern.  Most blogs today however have anti-spam measures in place.  Akismet and Spam Karma 2 are among the most popular. With measures like these in place, hardly any spam comments will ever see the light of day on your blog anyway.

Another suggestion is to place all comments into moderation - meaning that you have to approve the comment prior to it becoming visible on your blog.

It’s because of these measures that I’ve installed the ‘do-follow‘ plugin on my own blog;  to ensure that any visitors to my blog who take the time to submit a comment receive a litle link love from me.

But should you only post comments on blogs that do follow?  My opinion on this is that you should be posting with the goal of increasing traffic.  When someone sees a comment you’ve posted on a blog, they may click through to your website, thus bringing you targeted traffic.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the search engines expect to see a mixture of no follow and do follow links.  And, it should also be noted that by commenting on a blog the blog owner may return the favor and visit your blog as well.  I know I try to make a habit of this.

One terrific piece of software that will help you locate relevant blogs to post comments on is Comment Kahuna, created by Jason Potash.  Comment Kahuna saves me time as it auto-populates my profile details (name, URL and email address) so that I don’t have to type it in on every blog I want to comment on.  It also allows you to select the blogs you want to view and pick and choose which posts to comment on.  Definitely a must have piece of software to have.  And did I mention it’s free?!!