I’ve had an increasing number of emails from readers over the past few months telling me about problems that they have with Technorati.
Now I’m not wanting this to turn into a bitch session – I personally have a lot of time for the Technorati team who have developed a very useful tool in a relatively short period of time – however I’ve had my own frustrations with them in the past months also and am not having any luck in getting any attention from them.
Now on one hand I’m not too worried because in the scheme of things it doesn’t matter – but on the other hand when there is a tool that has a lot of potential like Technorati I’d be stupid not to want to get the most out of it.
Here’s four of the issues that I’ve been having:
Pings Not Working – No Indexing
When I look at the blogs I’ve claimed at Technorati on my Ping form it shows me that ProBlogger hasn’t been updated in 198 days. In fact this is the case for all of my blogs (only one seems to be up to date). As I look at the last 10 or so posts on this blog I notice that none have been indexed despite me pinging Technorati every time I post via ecto and despite me having tried to manually ping them via the web based ping service.
I’d really love to get indexed by technorati – but it’s been months from what I can tell since I have been on any (at least the one’s I’ve checked) of my 20 blogs (with the exception of 1). As a result when I’ve used Technorati Tags (something I’d love to be able to utilize better) they’ve failed to be indexed also.
Top 100 List Not Up to Date
This one’s probably got more to do with my own ego than anything else – but the past few months have seen ProBlogger gradually climb in it’s Technorati ranking. In the past couple of weeks it’s gone above the magical 100 mark for the first time. This should mean it’s featured in the Top 100 blogs – one would think so wouldn’t they?
Today ProBlogger is ranked 85th but the top 100 list doesn’t have any sign of it in that or any other position and hasn’t done so since the blog went past the 100 mark. It’s not a biggie – but it makes me wonder how many other blogs are missing in action from the ‘top list’.
API problems
Perhaps linked to the last point – other services that draw on Technorati through it’s API are having trouble with ProBlogger also. For example the Blog Network List that does a ranking of blogs in networks and networks doesn’t pick up ProBlogger in it’s Technorati lists. I’m told that this is something that is happening for a number of blogs that should be featured on the list and is something they’ve approached Technorati about to no avail. Matt from the list tells me that the API is just not reporting the data. I presume this is the same process that isn’t working with the Top 100 list. Once again it doesn’t both me that much except that it leaves holes and inaccuracies in the work of others.
Customer Support Silence
I cannot imagine the masses of incoming email and requests that the Technorati customer service department get so it doesn’t surprise me that apart from a number of automated thank you emails acknowledging my enquiries I’ve not heard anything from Technorati when I’ve asked questions on a number of occasions about the above issues.
While I have these frustrations I continue to use Technorati’s services every day on a number of levels but unfortunately the way I use it is for finding content on others blogs which is only half the purpose of it – I’d love for others to find my content via it also.
Hopefully 2006 will be a year of ironing out some of these difficulties for the team at Technorati.
Update: I’ve posted an update of my Technorati Problems here
Technorati is still listing my site as Rank: 251,589 (17 links from 11 sites)
Yet the page that link takes you to says 59 links, with 20 posts in the last 12 hours. The numbers don’t seem to have any internal consistency…
I have the same problem with Technorati, although my technorati rank is around 75 or something (it fluctuates over time), it never shows up on the top 100 list. I tried sending in an enquery and all I get is an automated reply saying they will get to me soon, and nothing after that.
I’ve just resent an email, hoping for some answers but nothing. It’s somewhat weird.
I’m not seeing the same behavior, exactly.
For example my article at
http://www.7gen.com/blog/consumption/resources/re-the-price-of-gasoline-could-get-ugly-in-2006/1015
got indexed by technorati, tags and all.
One thing I just noticed is it appears when you look at the contents of one of their tags, if you go deeper than 20 pages into the listing the content starts repeating itself over and over and over and over adnauseum. It’s as if there’s a certain size buffer, and rather than tell the user they’ve reached the end of the list, they just keep repeating the last 20 entries on the list.
The concern I have about technorati is they have no apparent means of income. Okay, they do have some sponsored links, but so what? Would a few google ads support a big operation like theirs? I doubt it. They have such a useful service, but without a means of income how do they expect to survive.
I’ve been noticing this about the web2.0 companies — that they didn’t learn the principle lesson of the .BUST years.
It’s rather silly to run a company without any plan to make the company self sufficient. In other words, no business plan will shortly mean no business.
I’m afraid this will apply to technorati. Oh well. Google blogsearch will have to be good enough.
David, according to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Technorati raised $6.5 million in VC recenty. Michael thinks this is about to run out, so tips Yahoo to buy them. They already have De.licio.us and Flickr, so Technorati would give them all three of the big social networking site. It makes sense.
[…] Also check out Problogger’s discussion of the ping-problem. […]
Technorati will not let me claim the http://moremerchant.com blog.
I have emailed customer service 3 or 4 times, over the past 2 months and never received a reply.
On another note, Kudos to feedburner. I posted on the http://crimsonlight.com site and within minutes they replied on the site!! WOW!
[…] A couple of weeks ago I blogged about My Technorati Problems and had quite a large response from it. Unfortunately the response came only from readers of this blog and not from Technorati themselves. Of course as they don’t seem to be indexing this blog I can understand this as my post will not have come up in their own watch lists for their name. […]
[…] […]
[…] Well, a lot of people including me were having Technorati problems. But I saw this in my feed yesterday and immediately rushed to check out my site’s Technorati Indexing and was thoroughly surprsied, no stunned is a better word as I saw the “Last Updated 1 Day ago” text which made me faint. Seeing this, I thought, “God! Atlast Technorati problems are over for me and now I can get some good links from Technorati”. […]
[…] Above, I mentioned some of the problems Technorati faced at the start and how most of them are now fixed. However, some bloggers (Darren Rose from ProBlogger has a good post on this), including myself, have still been facing some problems such as the ping feature not working, etc. I realise this is something you have to live with when your managing 30 million blogs and monitoring 1.2 million new blog posts per day. How would to respond to this? […]
The only problem I’ve had with Technorati is that I can’t figure out how to make the javascript-chicklet appear on my Blogger blog. Anyone else had this problem?
[…] If you don’t already know, my blog suffered from the “technorati mood swings”, where it states that my blog hasn’t been updated for more than 50days. It seems that I’m not the only onewho has this problem. […]
[…] Darren Rowse of Problogger even bitched about it in January. […]
yes, mine has suddenly just stopped updating – although I post daily.
I’ve emailed t’rati support but no response yet.
Technorati is a second rated service, but a popular, savvy, well designed and influential “website”, made popular by some of the more influential members of the blogosphere. All in all, technorati is a cool name for a “website”, but as a service it sucks.
Technorati seem to be having major problems today. Some popular tags are showing as non-existent and others as not having a new post for 55 days.
I wonder what has gone wrong?
[…] (Apparently, I am not alone.) […]
Tell me about it !my blog gets updated rarely and so it’s appearant it isn’t a validationg problem.Also if it was a feed problem then I doubt it would update at all.I would definitely think this is a problem on behalf of technorati itself.
[…] La secuencia de la argumentación es: no se sabe muy bien cómo rankear, pero escribamos un artículo rankeando; busquemos lo más que podamos, total ya conocemos algunos; y de última le preguntamos a Technorati. ¿Por qué no proceder de la misma forma con los artículos científicos que publica la revista? ¿Por qué no dejar que Technorati los evalúe? La fórmula del ranking de Technorati puede seguirse aquí; algunas quejas aquí y acá. Esperemos -mientras miramos los cinco blogs que propone la revista- otro artículo. Nature se lo merece. Tags —–> Historia,Historia Digital,ciencias,nature,blogs,technorati,evaluación » Archivado en Historia, Historia Digital por nquiroga a las 19:41. arriba […]
RE: TECHNORATI IS NOT INDEXING MY BLOG
My blog has not been indexed in over a year and I’ve been pinging them and sending emails forever, with no resolve.
I finally found an answer on the FEEDBURNER forums: it seems that Technorati’s spiders become confused by blogs that use the FEEDBURNER and as a result, they won’t index the blog.
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=4792
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=26654
I just removed my Feedburner from my blog and repinged Technorati. The others in the forum says that this works and I hope it does for me too! Give it a try.
[…] Apparently, I’m not the only WordPress blogger feeling such pain. It seems Darren Rowse got his indexing problem fixed (albeit not entirely to his satisfaction), but that’s because he’s a blogging god. I am pond scum in comparison. Is that why you don’t pay attention or respond to my emails? […]
Still no hope on our end from technorati on many of our sites.
Hell..with technorati..Same stuff happening with me. I thought i had some issues with my login. My other 2 blogs were working alright, but this one even after re-registering with another Id, shows its updated 9 days ago when i actually updated 1 hour back.
Sometimes i start to believe technorati needs some to shit down relax and god damn UPGRADE!
[…] To my surprise, I’ve learned that this is a common occurence, along with many other problems. You can see the examples here, here, and here, and there are many more in the comments to the actual articles. What’s scary here is that these problems are old. Really old – in Problogger’s case, older than a year. And now I have the same problem, and probably many others. Now, if a really well-visited blog like Problogger , which is among the top 100 Technorati blogs, had to wait for months to get its true ranking acknowledged or its posts indexed properly, I wonder – how can Technorati still be an authority on blogs? I like what Technorati has done for the blogosphere and it is still a great service, but if it can’t fix some basic problems like these then there is little point to its famous top lists and rankings, because they’re simply not correct – and that’s by their own standards. When blogging becomes business – Techcrunch UK on holdThe future of ‘European Google’ uncertainBloggers, return your laptops to Microsoft!Cell phones do not cause cancer, Danish study showsAllOfMP3 teaches RIAA about geography […]
I have this problem intermittently with all three of my Blogger blogs, and I have a workaround that seems to be effective – edit your post and tweak the posting time, then go back to Techno and ping again. Techno seems to ignore posts that have the same time stamp as those that have already been submitted (even if they also ignored them the first time around, and that’s the mystery here).
The problem with me is that one of my blogs just won’t even claim. I have another blog at blogsite.com that claimed instantly, my blog which uses the same blogger script, simply will not claim at all. I have emailed support several times, but to no avail.
I don’t know whether to give up or what.
i have the same problems particularly with pinging technorati… there is practically no update and it’s really frustrating
I think technorati relies on people not wanting to appear egotistical therefore not pushing for their statistics to be right. I am in the realm of ‘sewing blogs’ and there is a ‘Big list’ to which I have added myself, purely for reasons of feeling good about myself, and my work, but I think the person who has taken it upon herself to run it is just doing it to big up her own blog. I joined the list at number 179 and am now 287 when according the the technorati rank she says she uses I should be about number 88, but she just won’t update it.
Sorry..a moan opportunity. Ignore it if you want!
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And the problems still persist today. My site was flagged and I believe it was when my site was hacked so I wrote to Technorati to explain, answered all the basic questions required and no answer. Went back again a second time and still no answer.
Right now, you can’t even claim a new blog because they system just isn’t working. It’s rediculous and, even when my blogs were claimed, I still had the same issues of my blog not being pinged etc. I thought it was just me until I began doing my research on the web.
Whilst a useful tool, my shout is “next!” There are too many other useful tools out there to worry too much about Technorati and their issues. would be nice if the team got their act together.
Trish
I know this is an old post Darren, but Technorati is having major issues again. Note the banner at the top of their site: “Notice: Maintenance May 11, colo move continues. Search is slow and may be unresponsive. Feeds are off for now.,” (this has been going on for weeks – only the date changes) . I couldn’t log in for a week, and finally today was a succes and BOOM and my blog information is missing from my profile (4 years of information), when I at least try and claim it back the message Technorati gives is:
“Blog claiming is temporarily unavailable. Sorry, Technorati’s claim service is down for the moment. We’ll have it back up and running as soon as possible.” Technorati is being very quiet about what is going on. Have you heard anything?
Catherine