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It just occured to me: You know those posts Weblogs Inc feeds us about once a week, the ones that tell us "The Best Of Weblogs Inc"? They're all gaming Technorati.

See, the latest one of these "posts" contains 69 links to other Weblogs properties, and Technorati counts every single one. And since these posts are replicated across all of Weblogs properties, getting seven links in the post (as Slashfood did) can translate to well over a hundred links in just one day.

Consider HD Beat. On Technorati's results, every single link on the first page is from another Weblogs Inc property. Does Technorati recognize these posts and elminate the link juice from them? It sure doesn't seem that way, since they are starting to litter the blogosphere. I can understand Jason Calacanis wanting to point out good stuff on his other blogs, but it needs to be done in a method that search engines recognize and ignore. We can't have results being gamed by an automatic posting system like this. How high would HD Beat (248 sites linking) rank if it couldn't count on hundreds of links from other Weblogs blogs, links that are not editorial in any fashion, but promotional.

This is something all the blog search engines need to work around, or that Weblogs needs to stop doing until they do. It is wrong to congratulate yourself on having your blogs in high positions on link-based lists when many of those links are self generated. Its that gray area between link spam and editorial linking that this falls into, and I'd like to think the folks at Weblogs Inc are honest enough to clean this up. We'll see.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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