Most people I know are like me in one respect. They would work for hours rather than ask for customer service help, especially where a computer is involved. Usually it’s because the folks in customer service aren’t much help at all. With Technorati, it’s either because the service has been touch and go, or because we understand how much Janice Myint and her Customer Service Team have to straighten out. . . .
So I figure a review of where things stand after this latests upgrade might let us all know what’s there the next time we need to find our way.
A Family of Support Pages
There is at least one addition in the Technorati household. The cute little fellow has a serious adult name. It’s called by the moniker, Technorati: Support FAQ. Perhaps the family is thinking it’ll grow into it.
Now Technorati has quite a family of support documents to choose from. They are all under the HELP link in the gray nav bar at the top of the page. A click there will lead you to all of this information.
- About Technorati gives basic information about the blog search engine. This is where you find out that Technorati is currently tracking 33.1 million sites and 2.2 billion links.
- Blogging Basics covers the most basic description of weblogs in a Q&A format.
- The FAQ answers frequently-asked questions about Technorati and terms and symbols used on their site.
- How-tos is a collection of posts by
-
Steve Rubel,
Know More Media,
Paul Stamatiou,
Improbulus,
David Fordee,
Ryan Daigle,
Fitzgerald,
Sam Sugar,
and Brad IsaacThe posts cover topics from hot-to hack Technorati, how-to build tags, to how-to use tags to increase your blog’s traffics. The links above are not all that you will find there. Some writers did more than one post.
- If you like that page, there is Technorati Tools, which includes Browser Plugins, Bookmarklets, and more links–this time tools from users, including Lorelle VanFossen and David Smith, on tools for using Technorati to its fullest.
- Of course, you’ve already checked out the Publisher’s Guide, which
gives the basics on claiming a blog. - Two pages: Blog Finder and Tags explain what the tagged web is about.
- The Support FAQ. the newest addition, but I wouldn’t call it the baby.
The Support FAQ
The Support FAQ page is a concerted effort to address most of the issues that have been the talk of Technorati. Someone, or some ones, have spent some time putting it together, and though such things are never complete, this page is a fine start. Here’s what you’ll find there.
- What to do you if you have trouble claiming your blog–with special notes on Yahoo 360, MySpaces, MSN Spaces
- An explanation of the difference between post and blog tags
- How link counts work
- What you might do to when spiders aren’t reading your posts correctly
- How to ping Technorati when your posts AND links from others aren’t showing up
- How the Technorati user name display works
- How to redirect a URL change so that you keep your links
- What to do if you no longer want a post in the index–hint: don’t delete it!
Okay done. Believe me, I don’t, nor do I wish, to work for Technorati. I’m sure that’s a relief to David Sifry. I would like to stop by, though, the next time I’m in San Francisco to meet all of the folks who work on my blogs, especially those who made a big deal of Friday’s fairy tale. 🙂
Now we have all of the support options together in one post for a quick run down. Hopefully this will help us when we need to know our options. An even bigger hope is that we’ll never need to think of any of this again.
Of course, while I was writing this post, I repinged all of my blogs. Sigh.
Good thing, I’m still the nice one.
I’ve started a new category–Technorati. It’s become a case study in building a brand.
ME “Liz” Strauss
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Thanks for putting this together, Liz!
Hi Easton,
Thank you. I appreciate your noticing.
Was that your article that made it on to the How-to page for KnowMoreMedia? It was a great addition I think.
If we all get our act together, we’ll have something that works and we won’t need the mainstream media to “fix” it for us. The internet is about community after all. 🙂
Liz
Yeah, well, I asked Technorati tech support two questions about three millenia ago and I’m still waiting for a response. Not impressed.
Hi Ara,
Maybe I can help by shaking something loose. What were your questions?
Hi Liz,
Here’s more info on Technorati and a series on how to increase your blogs traffic.
http://www.johntp.com/2006/03/24/how-to-increase-your-blogs-traffic-part1/
Hi John,
Thanks for adding to the list. Every bit of information helps. You’re a good one JohnTP.
Liz
Ara,
Glad to hear your questions are answered. I like to know that problems get solved.
Liz
Hey Liz,
Thanks for the info, you know how much of a Technorati dud I was.
Aleast I have some basic things in place right now, this will help me even more.
Thanks
Keith
Hi Keith,
There’s a ton of stuff there, and it’s growing every day. Glad that this page helped you find it all.
Liz
Cool, thanks. I’m trying to figure out if their “spider” really exists. The only posts it has picked up from my blog (and I’ve pinged and panged and whatever) are recent posts, and then there’s a gap for a little over a year and then it has some of my older stuff.
And yes, I get the “updated 1 hour ago” messages, but it seems to only pick up my site feed and not visit the site itself. Dunno. Still learning at this point, but thanks for the resource.
Ben,
Send me an email at lizsun2@gmail.com about this.
My situation:
I signed up for Technorati on April 27, and claimed my blog http://sillyoldbear.blogspot.com
Immediately I noticed if I searched my blog for common terms (such as “kids” since I write about my kids) that it would find entries starting about 380 days ago. After a couple of posts, which were written with technorati tags (unless I messed up) I noticed the new posts would show up. But there seems to be no indexing of search items for the last year.
I’ve started to use Feedburner, which seems to be working okay, and lists the technorati search bot in the subscriber list, btw.
After much google searching, I read that a) Technorati spider only looks at the main page and not old links or archived links and b) you must be using valid markup. But the only valid markup I have found is at technorati itself, last time I checked Boing, Boing for instance there were over 100 errors reported. So I don’t think that’s exactly true.
I was going to wait and see what happened with the searches but when new posts would show up within minutes I thought perhaps it didn’t take very long. If I’m just being impatient let me know (but why are there posts from two years ago in the index but not from last fall?)
Thanks for any insight you can share, even pointing me in the right direction to dig for help would be fantastic.
Ben,
It really seems there is a problem with the indexing of your blog.
I’m going to look into it in the morning.
Liz