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.
