Filtering Spam Out Of Technorati Search Feeds
Blogging, Scattered Thoughts August 9th, 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
When participating in a particular niche, you will usually want to make sure you can keep up with all of the latest news and commentary that is being published. One great way to do this is to simply to subscribe to a “blog search” feed through Technorati. The problem, however, is that over half of the results coming through that feed will be spam.
I subscribe to a handful of these feeds so that I can catch any information that doesn’t get posted to my individual website subscriptions, and possibly find new blogs to subscribe to. But with all the spam in the blogosphere, I would frequently just mark the feeds as “read” because I didn’t have the time to sort through garbage. That was until a couple weeks ago when I happened to find Technorati’s simple search engine.
What I had been wanting to do was filter my RSS feeds so that only blogs with authority would be displayed. The thinking behind this is that most spam blogs are not going to get a significant amount of other blogs linking to them, and so they would not be included in my custom feed. Unfortunately, neither the standard Technorati search box, nor the advanced search page allow you to filter by authority. The simple search page does:
The actual RSS subscribe button that results from this search page doesn’t seem to pass the exact authority setting (ranging from ‘a1′ to ‘a7′), so instead, you can simply make your own feed link:
http://feeds.technorati.com/search/keyword+phrase?language=en&authority=a4
Now, instead of subscribing to a general RSS search feed for the term “affiliate marketing,” I am subscribed to all blog posts that contain “affiliate marketing” and are on blogs with a Technorati authority of about 20+
The result? Although I do still get some spam and/or duplicate posts coming through these feeds, the majority are real posts on genuine blogs. Because of this, I’m wasting less time sorting through garbage and finding a lot of good information.
August 9th, 2007 at 3:19 am
True Derek, I too employed the very same method to filter out spam. But I reverted back to finding blogs with any authority because, as it blinded me from finding new and aspiring affiliates who have some real good stories & experiences to tell.
August 21st, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Yes, that is definitely a downside of this technique. The way I look at it though is that if they have any content worth reading, they will eventually get some authority and make it into “my” feed. Once I notice a good blog, I will usually browse through their archives so there is still a chance I could read one of their posts that I missed when they had no authority.