Does Technorati Actually Do Anything?
January 31, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Blogging, Technical Functions : Trackback,
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This is a big break from my normal writing, but I'd love if someone could tell me that I'm not the only having trouble with Technorati. Here's the background:
- 1. I claimed Cerulean Sanctum on their site long before anyone had ever heard of Technorati. The blog shows up there correctly under my name.2. I inserted Technorati's embedded search and reference links in my blog template at Blogger.
3. I configured automatic pinging at Blogger that sent update pings to Technorati from the first day that Blogger offered that feature.
4. I wasn't sold on the tagging feature when they introduced it, but I've finally come around and started including tags as of the last day of 2005.
Now here's the weird part:
- 1. When I use Technorati's search to search Cerulean Sanctum, the only results that come back are a year and a half old. It doesn't seem to have tracked anything in the last eighteen months.2. Technorati's own ping page shows they are receiving my blog update pings correctly, yet searches from Technorati's site never show any references to Cerulean Sanctum except within other people's pages, never from within my own domain.
3. I've never once seen any robots or spiders from Technorati crawl my domain. I'm not certain they use such things, but the logs never show anything from Technorati coming through here.
4. I've never seen a log file that showed anyone following a link from Technorati to my blog.
5. Even though the pinger says the site is current in their datebase, none of the tags are showing up in Technorati's tag search. A click on the tags in the blog takes you right to Technorati's tags for that topic, so they're configured correctly
Anyone else experiencing this same bizarre behavior with Technorati? It's like the blog exists in their database, but Technorati seems blind to whatever the content is.
Feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Update: Does anyone know how to contact Technorati to get answers to these issues? They don't list any contacts on their site and their FAQ/Help page is next to useless.
Tags: Technorati, Tags, Search
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If you input http://www.dedelen.com in Technorati�s search box, it will only return sites that link to you. In your case it lists 259 sites link to: Dan & Danei Edelen’s Homepage and then lists the most recent 20 links. This looks like it is working correctly.
If you input just a phase or word in Technorati�s search box, any page on your site that contain the word or phase should appear. I�m not sure why Technorati is not indexing your pages, but when I compare the code you are using with mine, they are different. My code is a javascript. Maybe Technorati has changed the code needed. See if you can update it.
Finally, on your tags I do note one issue. You are not coding two word tags incorrectly. For example, on a tag from yesterday you have:
href=”http://technorati.com/tag/God” will=”" rel=”tag”>God’s Will (notice that I had to remove the leading and ending tag so it would show the code.)
It should be:
href=”http://technorati.com/tag/God+will” rel=”tag”>God’s Will
Note the �+� sign between the words in the http address.
Another example: A tag for Emerging Church would look like this:
href=”http://technorati.com/tag/emerging+church” rel=”tag”>Emerging Church
Hope this helps.
Blind Beggar,
I’m not sure what you’re seeing that is different concerning the Technorati javascript. What I have at the end of my right sidebar is exactly what I copied off their site (in their Configure Blog control page.) Now I did change it recently to include the search down in that end section with the rest of the Technorati stuff rather than higher up in the sidebar like it was before, but still.
I’m using a DHTML script that works with Greasemonkey in Firefox to generate the Tags. It rewrites the Blogger interface to do this—highly cool. I think the problem here is that the script doesn’t like the apostrophe in the tag “God’s Will.” That seems to be the cause. I noticed that, too. However, I tagged a post last week with the tag “Batavia” (obviously not common) but that post does not come up on Technorati, even though clicking on the Batavia tag works.
Hmm.
Thanks for the help!
Dan,
I’ve certainly had trouble with technorati too. Whether I manually “ping” them or have wordpress do it, the technorati site will still say something like “your blog page last updated 18 days ago”. This apparently is accurate since when I do a word search on my site with Technorati no new stuff shows up, only older posts. I don’t know whether they just have a very inefficient process of crawling or whether they’re selective in what blogs they crawl, less popular ones getting pushed to the end of the line to crawl. I’m registered with Google Sitemaps which keeps me updated with google it seems on a daily basis.
p.s. thanks for the great blog.
Dan,
If and when you have time, I’d be interested in knowing why you were reluctant to use the tags. Did you wonder if it really made any difference? That seems to be the conclusion you’ve now reached.
I may just be a Luddite when it comes to the lists of features that sites like Technorati try to dazzle me with, I don’t know. But since you and your other commenters seem to know more about it, I’d be interested in hearing more.
Dave,
I’ve got a very simple answer to your question about being late to the Technorati Tag game:
VHS vs. Beta
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
Technorati vs. Del.icio.us vs. Everyone Else’s Tags
I wasn’t sure if Technorati Tags were going to catch on. And if they did, would Technorati be an also-ran to del.icio.us or any of the other tagged sites? For a while it looked as if Technorati was down for the count, but they’ve fixed some of their problems (although not the ones I highlight in my post!) and look to be the 800 pound gorilla here. I’m not seeing as many del.icio.us tags anymore and I won’t adopt the other me-too tag sites out there.
Choosing a tag system will make you look silly if you tag all your posts and then your tag site goes away or tags fall out of favor. I didn’t want that to happen to all my posts.
Tags in general aren’t going anywhere. If you were using Movable Type or Wordpress, adding tags to your posts and then having them link to Technorati or wherever instead of internally would be fairly easy. Blogger is more basic in part because they are aiming for a less tech-savvy audience/intended to be a starter platform.
As far as Technorati being an also-ran, they existed before del.icio.us and others, but honestly I think they are tired. FWIW, I’ve been in the industry for 8 years.
On the Technorati home page the ‘contact us’ link has a fill in page, as well as phone numbers and street address.
My blog has 126 sites linking to it, according to Technorati, and that has been unchanged for over a month. But I know of links on other blogs added since then. Were some deleted at some blogs at exactly the same time? Or is that 126 number stuck there?
In other words, I’ve got my doubts about Technorati too.
Everything was fine on my blog with Technorati until a few days ago and now I’ve got the same problem. My pings don’t work, whether they are sent with posts or whether I use the manual ping at Technorati’s website. That means that nobody who relies on Technorati knows that my site has been updated, and my traffic is down.
Looking around the web tonight, I see others having the same problems, some starting in January, even large well-established blogs. I’ve only been waiting for a response via email from their tech support for a couple of days now; others seem to have waited a lot longer with no response. That’s scary.
I’m wondering whether I accidentally deleted their javascript when I switched around some of my sidebar material. Does anyone know how to get the code I’m supposed to have embedded on my site for them to recognize me? (I want to get the code again without accidentally having them erase my entire site from their records, of course.) I don’t even recall whether there is such code for sure.