In WordPress 2.3 Dashboard, the Incoming Links stats under the Latest Activity section has switched from Technorati to Google Blog Search to feed and update the information of any new backlinks acquired by the blog. However, there is an obvious issue when using Google Blog Search to list incoming links – that the resulted data shows your own latest blog posts from the front index page as being an incoming link, instead of real external incoming backlinks referenced to your blog from other blogs.

The Incoming Links data is useful to know which blog posts have attracted attention or generated attention of other bloggers or webmasters, and if there is any ‘accidental’ copycat of your blog articles (those who copy and paste everything including embedded internal links blindly), as Incoming Links will list who is linking to your blog. The reason WordPress development change from Technorati to Google Blog Search is unknown. Probably because some has feel that the incoming links results provided by Technorati is inaccurate (incoming link that not actually happen and exist) or full of spam.

If you prefer Technorati incoming links results as Google BlogSearch will return your own posts included in the list of sites linking to you if you link to your own posts from other posts, and make the information useless, and you don’t to go to Technorati homepage to get related information, you can set and change back to use Technorati search engine as your default incoming links provider by changing the following line of text in index-extra.php file located in wp-admin directory.

Open up /wp-admin/index-extra.php file in any text editor, and search for the following lines, normally locate in line 11 and 12 (lines wrapped for easier reading):

$rss_feed = apply_filters( 'dashboard_incoming_links_feed', 'http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&
ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss&partner=wordpress&q=link:' . trailingslashit( get_option('home') ) );
$more_link = apply_filters( 'dashboard_incoming_links_link', 'http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&
partner=wordpress&q=link:' . trailingslashit( get_option('home') ) );

Replace the

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&
ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss&partner=wordpress&q=link:

and

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&
partner=wordpress&q=link:

in the lines above to the following respectively:

http://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url=
http://www.technorati.com/search/

Note that when you upgrade the WordPress core in future, you have to make this change again, unless the WordPress development team switch back to Technorati, or you make a backup copy of index-extra.php and avoid the changed version to be overwritten, or, recommended, to use a plugin to replace with Google Blog Search with Technorati instead.

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