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
I started using Technorati earlier this week at http://americanmoderateparty.blogspot.com. It works fine, but I also tend to manually ping both Google and Technorati once a day.
We’ll see how much I’m crawled in a few weeks/months.
I had the issue with the ping. Customer Service did reply though and said my blog had been ‘flagged incorrectly’ in the database. She flipped the switch and I got recrawled. I asked what could be done to make sure it didn’t happen again but got no reply.
On the API front, I’ve been trying to get ahold of somebody too for my Eh List (http://ehlist.ca) as I have similar issue that the Blog Network guys do. The conversation started, but then stopped. I’m thinking I might actually pick up a phone instead of using email. We’ll see.
But that’s the thing eh? It seems everybody has a gripe with Technorati, but we just keep on using it.
Darren, I noticed a while back that when you gave my blog a link, it didn’t show up in Technorati. When I emailed you about it, the very next one appeared bold as brass. I assumed that you had changed your method, maybe pinged manually. Some people turn off pinging in WP because it does hold up posting a lot. Maybe ecto isn’t fully compatible with Technorati?
Of my ten blogs claimed all are now updated regularly and indexed smartly. I rely on the “Allow Pings” feature in WP 1.5.2, which uses Pingomatic. The only one which remained stubbornly on 0 links was “Supernatural”. At first I though there was something paranormal going on. Then I lost patience and deleted it and reclaimed. That broke the logjam. Now it’s running up to scratch and with links growing.
Maybe you could try the same. You won’t lose the links you’ve got, as claiming doesn’t affect the index in the database.
I’m a new blogger and started using technorati for nirlog.com after reading your blog to get some juice out of it and it’s working ok for me
Hi Darren,
When I first started blogging I had a similar problem and it turned out that the type of feed I was publishing wasn’t correct…I had to mess with the auto-discovery feed information in my header to get Technorati to see my posts.
Technorati apparently builds their index from feeds, so if your auto-discovery set-up doesn’t work for them you’re out of luck, and since they never return e-mails it’s very difficult to figure out what’s wrong.
I’ve since had the same problem with newer blogs, so I now copy the format of the auto-discovery code from the blog that WAS working, and the new blogs work fine.
I’m not sure how to post code to this comment, but you could take a look at the source code for my blog to see how I did it. It’s the line that includes:
link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”RSS” blah, blah, blah.
Obviously, you need to witch out the address to your feed.
Can’t promise it will help, but it fixed it for me.
I am so glad to read this. I have sent emails to technorati and have gotten completely frustrated with the service. Of our 10 or so blogs, the ones that we do not update regularly show up updating often in the technorati index. The ones that have regular new posts rarely show updates.
It is hit and miss, and very frustrating. Sites like the Washington Post use technorati on their pages and can drive a good bit of traffic to our sites, but if technorati is not picking it up, it never makes the washington post pages.
I guess I am glad that it is not just my sites, because misery loves company.
We’ve been having similar problems with Technorati. We’ll try Peter’s idea of manually pinging technorati, and if that doesn’t do the trick we’ll try emailing customer service.
I’ve had my load of problems with technorati myself.
At one point in time, it stopped indexing my site. I looked for a solution in the discussion forums and found out that others had solved their problem by making their pages W3C XHTML 1.0 compliant. I was skeptical, but I proceeded in corrected all the mistakes the W3C validator found on my pages. I had lots of them. Even though it did not affect the actual display of the page, the errors were there nonetheless. It appears as though the technorati robot is not very forgiving.
But even after I fixed this, I’ve had some problems with Technorati not indexing my site. Some of the difficulties I’ve had were with delays. I’d post an article and it would take HOURS before it showed up on technorati. Just this week, I posted 5 or 6 articles, and 3 of those didn’t show up on the site AT ALL. I had to go in WordPress, and re-save the article for technorati to acknowledge its presence, even though the XML RSS feed contained the article.
So I believe that Technorati should be working in making their robot a little more forgiving and address these issues pronto.
brem
I agree with Tom – it’s nice to know that you are not alone.
Both of my blogs have not been indexed in nearly 2 months, and manual pings have not remedied the situation. I e-mailed Technorati this a number of times – but never received any sort of response.
I love Technorati, but there are definite issues that need to be addressed.
According to my claimed blogs page, mine has zero links from zero sites. But if you click on the site name to search, you see a bunch of links for lots of sites.
This also causes me to have a bottom-barrel ranking
No real response from tech support yet
I just called them and, although I spoke to a real person, she was about as helpful as their e-mail tech support (which never reponds). I also had the never-updating problem, even with manual pinging. Based on a comment that I read here, I deleted my claim, and then tried to reclaim it. The problem is that my blog is now listed as ‘unclaimable.’ Grrrr…
I forgot to mention that there exist a Firefox extension that displays whether the page you are currently viewing is XTHML compliant or not.
You can find the extension here.
Very useful.
Ah… I had another issue with them.
The displayed incoming links to your blog.
It’s totally everything and nothing. It is used to determine your blog’s popularity, but it’s totally unreliable. One of my friend started a new blog and included some of my other friends’ blogs on his blogroll. The Technorati robot was so stupid it considered that each page on the blog was a different blog, this counted as one more link towards the friends’ blogs.
Don’t they check the IP address of the URLs?
I can only echo what people are saying above. Emailed support many times and received no reply. I’m past the point of caring now – I can live without Technorati.
The basic IDEA of Technorati is excellent. But they do need to clean things up. Not the design (which is great now), but how things work.
I have the same problems Darren describes: One of my sites is not updated, even if everything is set up correctly. I have used the support form to contact them and never heard anything again.
I’ve stopped pinging technorati on one of my blogs. I don’t want them to have my content anymore. Problems on their end have them successfully indexing one of my sites, but people can’t actually click on the link to visit my site. So they are indexing the content and making money off my content by displaying inline ads. Yet the send that site no traffic.
I’ve been trying to get in touch with their support people since August. Never a response. So I even blogged about the problem and the president left a message on my blog offering to look into it if I would email him. I sent him an email and guess what….. he never responded either.
So now for this one site Technorati is nothing more than a scraper site. They index my content, display ads, and give me nothing in return.
Interesting post there – deals with an issue which has been rather close to my heart recently, as I’ve been having the exact same problem with indexing/pings on my blog.
However, I’ve found the tech support to be quite good. I e-mailed them just before Christmas, and they got back to me shortly after the festive season. This is what they said – perhaps it’ll be of use to you guys. (BTW: I tried deleting and re-claiming, to no avail.)
We apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I’ve checked to see why you are having trouble with indexing for “jonathan-
d.blogspot.com”. I’ve manually pushed an update for your blog and all seems to be working correctly and has updated with
your most recent posts.
“””
http://www.technorati.com/search/jonathan-d.blogspot.com
“””
So, I took a look at your source code to see why your blog isn’t updating automatically when you make changes and add
posts. I noticed it may be because the embed code isn’t quite right. Currently, it is:
However the .js id is different for your current claim. To view the correct script code, go to your account:
http://technorati.com/account/
and click on “Configure Blog” for your blog. Scroll down and check the embed code near the bottom of the page. You’ll note
that this is different from what’s currently in your code.
The reason this is different is that each time you claim a blog, whether it’s been claimed before or not, a new unique code is
created. I suspect that when you deleted and re-claimed your blog, the embed code wasn’t updated in your blog template in
Blogspot. Try updating your embed code in your blog template and republish your blog.
This would definitely explain most of the problem. We have rolled out improvements and upgrades since your last email as
well, and so other issues that may have contributed to the problem should have been solved in that time.
If you continue to see problems with updates, please contact us. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other
questions. Thank you for using Technorati! And Happy Holidays!
This worked for a couple of days, but then nothing since. :-(
technorati is a nice site with all its tags.
That .js tip is most interesting. Mine was different, too. Might explain a lot. Let’s see if things work better after making that change!
I try to use some Bunny Tags although I’m not efficient at it. I have claimed all my blogs at Technorati. I have created watch lists but I rarely look at them in fact, most of my watchlists are just of my sites (i just do live searches if I’m looking at that time) … But – on my blogs, I can see my posts in Technorati within 5 minutes of a post. I’m currently using 3 pings in my wordpress options… (1) the default (2) the technorati ping and (3) the feedburner ping.
It’s interesting to note other people having problems with the site – that is news to me. I like them.
Similar problem for me: I’m indexed as blog, but my posts are not, never. But in this particular case it seems a problem of the public blog platform Splinder on which I’m hosted.
I’ve noticed that my blogs at blogger are not updated but my wordpress blog are getting immediately updated. On http://www.guitarwarehouse.com/blog/ I add the Technorait tag in the post and they show up immediately, but none of my post for http://learn-about-internet-marketing.blogspot.com/ are being index. Both are very new blogs, the only difference is the Tag in the post.
My experience has been the opposite of what I’ve been reading here.
I had a self-generated Technorati issues. (My error in first setting up the account.)
I emailed them, and although it took about a week, I did get a response clearly outlining how to solve the problem. Maybe it was because it was easy to resolve, maybe it’s because it was my fault and I wasn’t complaining about them, maybe it was just good karma on that day.
I’ve had the exact same problem with update pings not working. Even when I go to the manual ping page, it doesn’t work. Here’s how I’ve tried pinging and none of them have worked:
Ping-o-matic – using WordPress and manually
Pingoat – using WordPress and manually
Technorati ping using WordPress
Technorati manual ping
I was considering an email to support, but if they won’t answer you, I doubt they’ll answer me.
Technorati excludes some blogs from its index that have engaged automated creation of links and other content on the immediate site or through a network of sites. Sometimes webmasters like to use specially crafted tools in an attempt to boost their own site or sites, including scraping the content of other bloggers. If you would like higher placement for ProBlogger, you may want to reexamine your current online presence.
It is always a good idea to check your site for (x)HTML and feed validation. Valid markup ensures your content is read by more people in more places across the web. It’s the #1 tip for webmasters from large referral sources such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, as well as from Technorati.
Markup errors are obstacles a browser or indexer needs to overcome before making proper sense of your content. Development teams spend many days writing code to work around the different obstacles a content publisher may create, but if your content is valid then you at least know you are not requiring a special case for a browser or search engine.
One popular feed aggregator developer told me he spent an entire day coding around the errors in just one popular blogger’s feed. It’s tough to code for all the possible errors and necessary corrective maneuvers.
If you see an old update time for your blogs on the Technorati ping screen it may be an issue with your session cookie. A URL search for your blog should display the same information, or you can visit your Technorati account page and the cookie will be reset. We’re working on fixing the session handling on our new member ping page feature.
Niall Kennedy
Community Manager
Technorati
Regarding pinging, it’s always a good idea to cut out the middleman (if possible) to ensure your update notification is properly delivered.
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/pingPing-o-Matic is a free service created to make it easy for you to notify many different sources of interest about your latest updates but it is possible that pings are dropped while the server is offline or under a heavy load. Technorati has committed some hardware and coding help to keep Ping-o-Matic a free and responsive service for its users, but it’s always best to send a direct notification to the services you absolutely want to reach.
Niall Kennedy
Community Manager
Technorati
Thanks Niall – appreciate you stopping by.
with regards to pinging directly – this is not my issue as I do that.
In terms of content – I’m not scraping others content here at ProBlogger so I doubt it’s that.
I’ll check into the other issues – although at the moment I’m getting error pages from Technorati so it might be something for tomorrow.
I stop using Technorati because they don’t update at all. I have tons of links that doesn show up at all.I am thinking Technorati isn’t being updated at all these day.
It would be easier if the ping process had a “pong” answer. This would make it a two way process, sure it would eat twice the bandwidth, but if it is more reliable, all the better, right?
my blog: ping technorati… hello.. I’ve posted
technorati: receiving ping… Processing…. Done. Pong this guy’s blog
my blog: thank you, I’m not sure you’ve updated properly! I won’t have to retry.
:)
I personally believe technorati’s problem is a lack of human resources to fix all the problems. Too sucessful, too fast. But unless another company decides to invest more time and money to develop something better, we have to follow and live with the bumps on the roads…
I haven’t had any trouble with them getting the ping and updating but they always show my updates 6 hours after they occur. The time on my blog is correct. This puts my posts way down the list when searching for a tag I’ve used. They don’t respond to my email either. Otherwise, everything’s working fine.
I was having MAJOR problems with claiming my blog at Technorati and blogged about it in a comments section. Dave Sifry himself helped me sort it out (thanks Dave) and now I have finally been able to claim my blog.
In the comments section of my post, Dave talks about Technorati hiring a new customer service firm:
http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2005/12/technorati-makes-good-case-study-about.html
Just to confirm my earlier post. I posted on my guitar blog… a wordpress blog.. http://www.guiatrwarehouse.com/blog/ and the post was immediately tagged at their site. I imbedded their tags in my post. Then I posted in my IM blog..ttp://learn-about-internet-marketing.blogspot.com/ ..a.blogger site… and it does not show.
I am going to move all my blogs to wordpress anyway. I just think it is funny how all this works.
Hopefully, the new resource is not going to be a “buffer” between the customers and the “real” tech support specialists. We’ll know something is going wrong if they move their service department to India. (not that I am saying indians are not good, but being geographically spread out is not a good idea in my book).
brem
I had not heard of these issues, but I am new at Technorati.
My blog is only about 4 weeks old with about 30 or so entries (verusnova.com/blog) – I confirmed that Technorati has me updated 6 hours ago, and when I search on my techno tags I see an entry for my recent entries. I will keep an eye on this though.
FYI – I am using WordPress and I noticed there is a feature that can help this. As Admin in the Options -> Writing form, on the bottom is a field called ‘Update Services’. In that box I have “http://rpc.pingomatic.com/”. My account at pingomatic pings all of the ping services I use including Technorati. This seems to work for me (so far).
Thank you.
I’ve posted articles and it’s not appeared in Technorati for hours. Tonight it was minutes. It’s hit or miss I thinik.
I realized Technorati hadn’t been updating my page for 14 days, and 37 days later I’ve not got anything back.
This is my checklist for getting a site working with Technorati:
First, realize that Technorati uses caching extensively, and so you may not see posts appear right away, as they might be serving you minutes-old data. They use a whole network of Squid servers configured as HTTP accelerators to accomplish this.
If you pinged Technorati and your posts don’t appear in 24 hours, and your blog is fairly new, it may have been flagged for manual review. To cut down on the splogging problem, Technorati has implemented several anti-spam measures, and many new blogs do wind up having to be manually reviewed. Unfortunately, this could take anywhere from days to weeks. I’d suggest sending in an email if your posts continue not appearing, but Technorati is receiving your pings.
Ensure that you have valid XHTML and valid RSS/Atom feeds. Also keep in mind that Technorati prefers full-content feeds to summary-only feeds. You may need to use full-content feeds (at least with Technorati) to ensure it picks up on all of your links and tags. I implemented a hack once which caused WordPress to serve original full-content feeds to Technorati, and FeedBurner feeds to everyone else. This isn’t too hard and it’ll get you better set up in Technorati.
Don’t bother pinging Technorati (or anybody else!) if you’re just posting generated or re-syndicated content, ESPECIALLY if you don’t have permission to republish or resyndicate the content! You’ll just get your blog blacklisted. And while you’re at it, go find a real job and get off the Internet, because we don’t like spammers. In fact, we’re passing a new law allowing year-round hunting of spammers with no bag limit. Your days are numbered. :)
Technorati does not count my incoming links. It says rank 1,059,666 (0 links from 0 sites) but below on the same page are all my incoming links.
Also no answer from their support.
They replied to me my blog was not getting indexed correctly because there were non w3 compliant errors. I fixed them but to no avail. As regards – x links from n sites – it keeps on reducing with time – is that normal. Are they losing older links?
I see that a number of commenters are saying that their Blogger blogs are having problems being indexed. Maybe they’re wondering if this the Mark Cuban effect? I think it may be that Blogger uses Weblogs.com to ping around. This has been sold by Dave Winer to a bigger company and is being upgraded. Could that be the hitch for Blogger?
Hmm.. I have questioned myself wondering what’s “up” with those technorati rank results (amtsleiter) but if it’s related to non-w3 compliant errors (quick online tips) .. then I’m in worse trouble than I ever thought. I get those dang errors all the time ..
I belive there are two things adversely affecting indexing on technorati. One is the RSS feeds. I found out after many weeks of struggling that if I pushed full content on my feed it would get indexed.
The other problem is domain mapping. Since I was having so many problems with indexing, I did some pretty extensive testing. It appears domain mapping can, under some circumstances, cause dual links within Technorati.
For example, lets take a fictional typepad blog for instance. myblog.typepad.com and the domain name mapped to that blog is http://www.mybloggie.com. If you ping either url, the links picked up can point back to the other (i.e. loop). It is my guess if mybloggie.com keeps linking to myblog.typepad.com on every ping (remember the loop) then it’s flagged as splog – or perhaps it just causes database problems. either way it’s logical to assume it causes a problem in the system. Technorati “fixes” by discontinuing the indexing.
My manual pings aren’t updating either.
I resolved to post every day but they say my last update was 6 days ago.
Technorai has been working pretty mediocre. I’ve just given up. I mean Google has been working faster for me than Technorati!
MoreMerchant.com has had problems with technorati. I will not let me claim it as my blog, and also does not allow posts to post on the site.
I have emailed them many times and never received a response.
What to do, what to do?…
Thank God! It’s not just me.
I put Technorati Tags on most of my posts, but they never seems to get indexed.
This wasn’t always the case – I used to get indexed fairly quickly, but about a month ago I noticed that Technoarati stopped listing me.
[…] This traffic tip may be obvious to some of you, but I know it’s not obvious to everyone. If you’ve been reading this blog in the last few days (of course, if you’re tracking it via Technorati then good luck — Technorati thinks I last updated it 5 days ago… I thought it was just me, but I see that even Darren Rowse has the same issues) then you’ve seen my introduction of The Toolbar Guide as another case study, one that especially lets me show off the use of AdSense referral buttons. (And be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to get the REAL reason to use referral buttons.) This site is in much the same vein as The Invisible Fence Guide, but I’m doing some things differently with it. […]
Darren, deleting my claim on Go Play AV (which was showing 51 days) and reclaiming it solved this problem for me.