Technorati made changes this week to the way it counts inbound links for purposes of determining its blog rankings. This had some effect on the Technorati 100 list.

Technorati was previously counting all links made to blogs on a given domain. So links to, for example, chinese.engadget.com were also counting towards engadet.com, even though they are separate blogs. They are no longer counting these links.

Engadget took the biggest hit, losing more than a quarter of their 30,000+ unique links over the last six months. They are still the top blog; however, no. 2 Gizmodo is within striking distance, whereas before they were not even close. TechCrunch was affected, dropping from no. 2 to no. 3 behind Gizmodo (our France, UK and Japan blogs are on subdomains). Even so, the changes seem appropriate.

Technorati VP Engineering Dorion Carroll explains the change here. There is still a massive amount of fraud links counted by Technorati in their Top Blogs list. I’m hoping that their newfound focus will lead to further changes.