Hey, WordPress Devs! You Screwed-Up Our Incoming Links

Sep 28, 2007 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 4 Comments

You know that convenient spot on the WordPress dashboard that shows links leading to your blog? Guess what. As of WordPress 2.3 it doesn’t work anymore. Some genius thought that instead of pulling the list from Technorati, they should use Google Blog Search instead. Now instead of seeing a list of recent incoming links, it seems to be more of a list of your recent posts. What’s with that? I hope they patch it soon.

Here’s an example:

What was the reason behind this change (could it be loading speed?), and why didn’t they notice the bug I just discovered?

  • http://www.blogsolid.com Imar

    Do you think the developers read this article and decided b5media should call the shots? Here’s the excerpt I’m talking about:

    “If you’re pretty tired of getting all the stock WordPress and Technorati links on your WordPress dashboard and want to make it more useful for you, the dev team has made the WordPress dashboard customizable via several new plugin hooks.

    We’ve been using this at b5media already to provide bloggers with feeds that are more relevant to them as well as replacing Technorati results with Google Blog Search results under Incoming Links. So far, no complaints!”

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    Well I’m complaining. So add a tally mark to the “complaints” column…

  • http://lorelle.wordpress.com/ Lorelle

    You are one of the few complaining. Few noticed. This has been changed for a very long time on WordPress.com blogs as, to my understanding, Technorati kept having trouble with their code and the pull on their server from WordPress blogs.

    Personally, I stopped finding the incoming links from Technorati helpful over a year ago and stopped looking, finding better results elsewhere, including on Google’s Blog Search. Neither of these are perfect, and I’ve done research on worse options, but Technorati has slid downhill recently in quality and quality control. I’ve even dropped their tag feeds from my feed reader as they were overrun with sex, drugs, and yuk not pertinent tag related content.

    You can use the Nusuni Technorati Links WordPress Plugin to put Technorati back. That’s the flexibility of WordPress. :D

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    I found the Nusuni plugin myself just a couple of days ago. I’d noticed that Technorati had been loading the links slowly before the change, but when they changed the incoming links in 2.3 (I didn’t upgrade until the final release, when I was sure it would be stable), I instantly didn’t like the changes. Google Blog Search likes to feed me my own backlinks, and there’s already a “recent posts” box for that, isn’t there? :D

    Technorati itself has been going downhill lately (unfortunately). I’m not aware of any good alternatives though (I don’t consider Google Blog Search to be one, it’s nowhere near as useful as “normal Google search”). Technorati just needs to get going and improve their services.