Technorati skipping smaller blogs?

I’ve been reading The MineThatData Blog for a few weeks now, and the other day there was an interesting article about understanding the traffic that a website receives. The article talked about using sites like Alexa, Blog Juice, Bloglines, and Technorati to measure a site’s popularity.

Overall it seems like a good approach to aggregate this data together to get the “big picture” of where one’s website stands in the web. I’ve tried this but I’ve noticed that Technorati doesn’t seem to report the numbers I expect it would.

For example: I got a link to my blog from Hip Egg a few weeks ago, and this link has not been reported on Technorati. I know this blog is small potatoes in the grand scope of the universe, but it strikes me as odd that my more recent updates are featured in my “favorites” (as is Hip Egg’s posts), yet the link from him hasn’t shown up.

My working assumption is that Technorati has some kind of filter where lower popularity sites aren’t “updated” as often as the bigger sites. Either that or the link database is broken. But links for other sites seem to be working, although I’m not watching them as closely as I watch my own stats.

At any rate I wonder how many other blogs (or sites in general) are suffering from this problem. Metrics for websites are difficult to agree on, so a site or sites where a reputation can be established and measured becomes more and more important. Aggregating data from multiple sites is a good start, but if there are too many “issues” with how a site is ranked, then the data becomes suspect and it becomes harder to get a clear picture of what’s going on.