David Sifry announces a new feature at technorati – Technorati Favorites which allows people to keep track of their favorite blogs on one page. You can add up to 50 blogs and then follow them via a single RSS stream. This sounds like a very useful tool – BUT…
Of course (rant ahead) readers of ProBlogger blog won’t be able to follow ProBlogger as a favorite because apparently we haven’t been posting for the past 6 days (despite the fact that I count 41 posts in that time).
Yep we’re still not being indexed.
Actually we did have a couple of days of indexing after a ProBlogger reader asked someone high at Technorati (not sure who) to look into my case. I’m not sure what they did but we started getting indexed within minutes of them making the request. We still were not being featured in the Top 100 despite being in the 70’s but something is better than nothing.
A few days after that however I finally got an email from someone in Technorati’s customer service department responding to my emails from the past few months. I explained we’d started being indexed but asked about the Top 100 list and mentioned my other blogs were not being indexed. He said he’d have a look.
Unfortunately I’ve not heard anything back since, despite more emails, and the next day Technorati stopped indexing ProBlogger again. That was a week ago and we’re back to the silent treatment. They are still tracking inbound links and giving a ranking (not featured on the top list) just ignoring my own posts.
Splog List – I’ve now heard from three sources who claim to know people at Technorati that ProBlogger might be on the Splog list and that they don’t tell bloggers who request information on why they are not indexed the reason. I can understand this on one level (they don’t want to give sploggers insider information – I admire them wanting to take a stand) but on another level I don’t understand how someone is supposed to defend such a charge if they don’t believe they are doing anything wrong or how they are supposed to fix what they are doing wrong if it’s an honest mistake.
I still respect and admire Technorati’s services, but am increasingly frustrated with it as it is rendered next to useless for me and readers wanting to interact with my blogs via them. By the comments in my previous posts on the topic here and here it seems I’m not alone.
update: this post has had some partial response. My friend with the contact at Technorati contacted them again and got them to look at it saying that they would unblock ProBlogger again. At around the same time Dave Sifry commented and asked me to outline the problems via email which I’ve done.
The result – once again posts seem to be being indexed and it’s picking up that I’ve updated more recently than 6 days ago. Still waiting to see if the other issues will resolve this time. Hopefully whatever happened will stick this time.
Hm, I just checked and you are indeed being indexed, all of your recent posts show up on Technorati…
I just added problogger.net to my favorites, and it showed up a-ok. What problems are you still experiencing? Drop me a line at dsifry AT technorati DOT com…
Dave
You’re not alone Darren … while my blog seems to get indexed okay I know of several who aren’t. And universally people who e-mail in don’t get responses either.
As much as the favourites are cool … I think they need to work on their support more too.
Thanks for responding David – I’ve just emailed my problems to you.
Tris – it does seem to be a problem. Of course I can understand when you’re indexing 28million blogs there’s got to be some glitches. I try to keep it in perspective and not get too worked up about it though.
I agree Darren … and David … you’re showing your typical excellence at tracking the blogosphere.
I think as support goes, and speaking as one of the people who answers a lot of Qumana support e-mails, it’s the toughest part of this whole biz. I’m not worked up about it, I know that it’s hard.
David … maybe there is a way we can put our heads together and find a good way to help.
They are completely hit and miss. I have one blog that is sufficiently original content that it got picked up by a syndicator that is apparently banned as a splog. (To be clear, I’m using “syndicator” in the old newspaper/TV sense of the word – someone sufficiently interested in republishing my content to actually pay me for it – not in the blogospheric sense.) On the other hand, I have a newer blog that is essentially tracking news stories on a particular topic and it is indexed. Though I do select the news stories personally and not through any sort of “scraping” and I comment on each one, it certainly would seem to fit the pattern of a splog much more closely than my blogs that have been banned. Technorati is seriously broken, they know it and except when called on it by someone with clout like you they simply don’t care. It’s time to start looking for an alternative.
Find me about $50 million in startup capital and I’ll code the next Technorati. Without glitches. :)
So if I want my blog unblocked, I have to make friends with someone at Technorati.
Great.
Let me look in my Rolodex, and call up the Wanda… I think she used to be the best friend of the the mechanic who works on the CEOs car.
It’s not so much that I resent Technorati, it’s just that I don’t understand why I am blocked in the first place. I use the tags, I write unique content, I don’t post porn, I don’t abuse the system or use cheap SEO tricks.
I’m obeying the rules… so what gives?
If the folks at Technorati would just say: “Brainshrub.com is being blocked because of A, B and C”, I could make the changes and be done with it.
But instead I am treated like a splog, and I have no idea why.
Yeh Darren, when I add you to my favorites, it says it added you, BUT you dont show up, odd. But other blogs like http://www.successful-blog.com does show up when I add it. Let me ask you, do you ping Technorati yourself by hand or use something like pingomatic?
-john
Technorati adds favourites … the good, the cool, and the darkside
Technorati added a new favourites feature last night. In a nutshell it lets you make certain blogs as favourites (like bookmarks) and share that …
I’m having trouble with this aswell, in the past 2 weeks I have had some heavy links from Gizmodo, Engadget and some Mac sites and I find that technorati doesn’t update my ratings at all or how many links to my site there are, im stuck on 0, to be honest they are a complete waste of time.
I recently tried these 5 tips for better Technorati indexing and they seem to have started working for me.
hey, darren.
i’m a regular reader and always find much of value on your pages, but i was just going to point to the same technorati indexing tips. when i ran this page through the W3C validator, it says: Failed validation, 50 errors. i cleaned up the validation on my own pages and although i’m hardly in your league, found myself nicely indexed shortly thereafter.
Technorati is constanly perplexing. On a few occasions I’ve found someone clicking through to my blogs from Technorati. But, when I clicked on the referrer link to go back to Technorati, there was no indication whatsoever of how the person got to my site.
As for splogs, I suspect Technorati is loaded with them. Case in point: I caught one splog rising to the top of the tags list the other night:
http://www.disarranging.com/review/archives/001650.php
Good luck to Darren and everyone else trying to get into Technorati. I’ve been trying to check for ProBlogger in Technorati for the last hour or so, but I keep getting, “experiencing a high volume of requests right now….” This, on a Saturday night in the states.