New Tool for Bloggers: Technorati Incoming Links Visualizer

Finally, a way to visualize a web page's new referrers. What's your "Incoming Link Rate?" Try it!

Technorati provides a nearly real-time tracking of incoming links — but the one thing they've always lacked is a way to visualize it. Now entering a URL below will generate a bar graph representing a site's last 100 incoming links. (Don't forget to include http://www )

It's possible the date of an incoming link could be in a different time zone (since that web page's server may be far away). This means Technorati appears to see mysterious incoming links arriving from the future.

Other caveats: I limited the display to links from the current year. (And not all web sites are tracked by Technorati - so there's a chance they may not have a record of your web site, or other sites which linked to it.)

But the patterns offer strong visual clues about a site's popularity... Many sites are so popular that displaying only 100 incoming links won't even cover a single day. Their bar graph is one vertical line that could just as easily be labelled "part of today."

Other sites show a reassuring consistency. Suck.com, which stopped publishing in 2001, lives in the memory of enough web surfers to draw an ongoing trickle of new incoming links.

Most popular sites fall somewhere in between.                          

Though some older sites have nearly been forgotten...


Technorati likes to say they reflect the "live" web -- an "always-updating" sample of the most recent links. They describe the value of their database as "Who's saying what. Right now." But if so, these graphs reflect the pace of that conversation -- or how loudly the crowd is whispering.



Technorati now tracks 74.7 million blogs, but most bloggers are only interested in one statistic: how many of them are linking to me? I like to think these visual graphs provide a fun answer, in the form of a digital pH strip.

When your site is popular, it turns black!

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