How To: Bring back Technorati incoming links widget in WordPress Dashboard
One of the much hyped “feature” in the recently released WordPress 2.3 is the Incoming links widget powered by Google BlogSearch, on the WordPress admin dashboard. Turns out it is a real pain - the links are mostly links to posts, from the index of the same blog. See the image given below to see what I mean.
Dammit! All links are from my own blog!
Google BlogSearch is touted as being superior to Technorati (by many authority bloggers). However, its weakness is evident - the links to self. Folks at Automattic thought that bringing Google BlogSearch would spruce up stuff, and it has obviously backfired. But the open-source community surrounding WordPress has come to the rescue again. And it is easier to correct the WordPress system than Google 
There is a plugin to bring back Technorati Incoming links widget (see end of this post). However, adding one more plugin for a trivial matter as this, is unwise, and may affect your blog optimization measures.
There is an easy way and a difficult one. The easy one is this:
Download this file (right click>Save Target As), open it in Notepad, Save As>”index-extra.php” (with the quotes). The file given is an unmodified (except for this hack) version of the file in WordPress 2.3. Upload the file to your /wp-admin folder (FTP client may want you to confirm that you want to rewrite the existing file, click Yes).
If you’re paranoid that I may introduce malicious code to your blog you can use this manual fix:
- Use your favourite FTP client and navigate to
/wp-admin/. Downloadindex-extra.php - Open it up in a text editor like Notepad, and search and find this URL:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss&partner=wordpress&q=link:Replace that complete URL with this URL:
http://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url= - Next, find this URL:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&partner=wordpress&q=link:Replace it with:
http://www.technorati.com/search/ - Upload it to
/wp-adminfolder.
WARNING: Do not introduce any space into the file, before or after the end of the PHP code. PHP files have an annoying problem of spewing errors if spaces are introduced carelessly.
If you faint-hearted do not want to do any of the above stuff, you can use Jeremy’s Technorati Links plugin.
You should have got back the Technorati Links widget by now. If you had any problems, tell me through comments.
This is something unrelated, but I was just wondering - are you aware that all the links in your blog are no-follow’d with the exception of the link in the logo and the links to other posts from within your posts?
Sorry if this was done intentionally - I simply couldn’t see why!
@Karthik: No, I did it intentionally. My logic is this - if there are fewer links from a page, each link gets more link equity. It may or may not be right - no harm in trying
Welcome to the Bloke’s network dude
@BlogBloke: Thanks, and I’ve left a comment on your post
Hey that’s a nice tip. I’ve not upgraded yet to 2.3 but I’ll do it today and I’m sure I’ll keep this post in mind while upgrading it
@Tipso: Thanks. I found the hack useful, so decided to share it with you. And upgrade to WP 2.3 if you like tags - otherwise, its not much different.
Sumesh, There is no such problem. The real stuff is that all backlink data is stored in a SQL string for temporary use, but sometimes it get clashes with alter link info by Technorati making it show other stuff which is just linking.
Anyways, nice tip and Technorati is far better than GBS.
@Rishi: Thanks, and Technorati certainly is better, atleast as far as blogs go
Oops, GBS does only blogs, so I guess it loses out, I guess!