I was fortunate to be one of the first people involved in the Technorati Favorites Exchange, started byMaki over at Dosh Dosh just over a month ago.  This, combined with my participation in many exchanges that were run by other participants, has netted me a lot of favorite adds.   As of this post, I am currently sitting as the 67th most favorited blog according to the Technorati Top 100 most favorited list.    Today is exactly one month after I posted my Technorati Favorites exchange, so I figure it was as good a time as any to reflect on it a bit. 

What does making the Technorati Top 100 mean?  Well, technically it means nothing.   Unless your ego needs stroked, making the Top 100 will not benefit you at all.   I checked my Google Analytics stats and show a total of zero hits from Technorati’s Top 100 page over the past month.  

So, what did I hope to get out of this exchange?  Well, the first and most important thing I got was the formation of many great relationships.  Blogging is like a big social network, and participating in these types of experiments has resulted in finding some new sites I normally wouldn’t have visited.  Some fit into my niche, while many others don’t, but I have other interests beyond technology and so I subscribe to many of them and enjoy the content they offer their readers.   

Another big benefit that is hard to measure is improved search ranking within Technorati.  If you’re looking for blogs of interest, why not go to the leader in blog search?   Technorati seems to factor favorites into their authority ranking, which helps with improving your position within their search results.   In checking my analytics, it seems that Technorati is referring more readers to my site, which will hopefully result in more long term feed subscribers. 

Overall, I am definitely of the opinion that this experiment was a success, with everyone who participated getting some sort of benefit out of it.  If you participated in the experiment, I would love to hear your thoughts on the exchange one month later.   Hopefully Maki will take the time to reflect on what appears to be his most popular post as well, since he started the whole thing!