How To Replace the WordPress Dashboard Google Blog Feed With Technorati

In WordPress version 2.3, the very important Technorati incoming links feed on the WordPress dashboard was quietly replaced by Google Blog Search. There hasn’t been much talk about this in the blogosphere because I don’t think most people have realized the change. To me, it was pretty noticeable because the frequency and quality of inbound links showing up on my dashboard just weren’t the same.

I prefer the Technorati inbound links compared to the Google Blog Search mainly because Technorati seems to have a better grip on the newest blogs so the inbound links show up faster on my Dashboard. Another thing I noticed is that real late at night, the Google Blog Search feed comes up blank so all of a sudden I have no inbound links which is odd.

So Why Did WordPress Make This Change?

Good question and after looking over the version 2.3 feature list, I couldn’t find any mention of it. Did WordPress decide to make this change because they felt Google Blog Search would provide better more relevant incoming links vs Technorati? Maybe Google approached the WordPress team and paid them under the table to switch over? Honestly, I don’t know and wasn’t able to find any factual information to support either theory. If you’ve read anything about this, please comment below and post a link.

The Good News

At least the WordPress developers decided to make the dashboard feed pluggable so plugins can change the feed that the dashboard uses. If you’d really like to know the details the new filter is ‘dash_feed_url’. Thank goodness this feature was enabled otherwise you’d get WordPress users hacking their core index-extra.php file to change the feed urls. Making this change directly to the core /wp-admin/index-extra.php is fine but just remember, the next time you upgrade your WordPress, it will clobber your changes.

I used to enjoy hacking the code WordPress files because I could tweak my instance of WordPress however I wanted. Not only that, it was a great learning experience and I understand the code much better now. The bad news was when I had to upgrade my WordPress blog and I realized all that hard work was going to be overwritten. From that point on, I started using plugins and left the core WordPress files alone. It just wasn’t worth the headache since new WordPress patches and updates come out several times a year.

Replace Google Feed With Technorati

Now here’s the part you’ve been waiting for. There’s a plugin that was recently written by My Digital Life which replaces the incoming links provided by Google Blog Search with the results provided by Technorati. I was really excited when I stumbled across this post as I was searching Google on ways to change my incoming links. The full article is here and you can download the plugin directly from here. It’s actually a really simple plugin with less than 10 lines of code but it does exactly what you want it to. Here’s the exact code from the plugin:

function technorati_incoming_feed($notused) {
return "https://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url=".trailingslashit(get_option('home'));
}
function technorati_incoming_link($notused) {
return "https://www.technorati.com/search/".trailingslashit(get_option('home'));
}
add_filter('dashboard_incoming_links_feed','technorati_incoming_feed');
add_filter('dashboard_incoming_links_link','technorati_incoming_link');


After you’ve added the plugin file to your plugin directory, activate it and then make your way over to your dashboard. You’ll instantly see the change in your inbound link list. If for some reason you want to switch back to the Google Blog Search incoming link list, just deactivate this plugin and that’s it.

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