There was once a time when Technorati.com meant something to online publishers. It was their professional reputation, and featuring on it was the goal of many.

Technorati hosts its own ranking system to determine the influence of websites, based on their subject matter and a range of factors, including in- and outgoing links, which establish authority and credibility. It is the place where you want your site to rank high, and we at The Next Web were among the many who once used it as an indicator.

It’s notable, then, that Technorati actually quietly removed its ranking system — which was perhaps the best-known and most thorough of any blog index on the web — at the end of May, as noted by Business2community.com.

Technorati did not announce the closing of its ranking index explicitly, but the information is buried inside a blog post announcing a major revision to the site:

You won’t find our blog claim process or authority index on this new website, as that technology is being redesigned and optimized to help publishers get discovered by advertisers and earn more for their highly-valued content.

Instead, the six-year-old company is focusing on developing its website advertising network. It claims to have “thousands” of partners, with a network that “boasts more than 100 million unique US users per month.”

The Technorai blog index was enormous and that data was doubt expensive to maintain, particularly as it didn’t make the company any money (even if it did help raise its awareness). In recent years, however, it struggled to stay relevant as the landscape shifted and social media enabled anyone to have a voice on the internet without starting a blog.

Nonetheless, it is sad to see something that once meant so much to many, and was so useful to others, disappear. The closure of the index also means that sites which used its data — such as this top 100 bloggers in Thailand list — are now obsolete.

Alexa is one service that you can use to rank websites, but Technorati was always geared towards blogs and seemed to give a more reliable and accurate reading — its layout also helped you to discover new content and sites. While the focus has shifted to social media, blog and website-ranking is still important, at least in our minds.

Image via Steven Chiang / Shutterstock

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