Having A Fresh Weblog Included In The Technorati List

Filed in Marketing Tips, reviews on May.29, 2010 By Keith Lunt

You might have decided that you need to get a Technorati Authority for your blog, but how do you go around it?

First, I used to believe that pinging Technorati works. Don’t bother, they ignore pings now! You might as well take away the ping from your blog and save the processing time. So what do you do? Here are the stages we have used to hastily get a ranking.

1. Go technorati.com and sign up for an account. Easy. You will need to validate it as usual by clicking an email link, but on the whole, nothing clever!

2. Find the claim a weblog button. Follow the form for directions here – enter your blog URL and press next, then type in the particulars you find. Don’t submit it merely yet!

If you don’t know your RSS feed address, it could be displayed on your site somewhere. Only right click and then copy link location to copy it and paste it where it is asked for. If it isn’t shown somewhere, you are omitted a trick!

3. One of the optional fields is for sites linking back to you. If you have been using FTS or article directories, then you should have some of these. Go to Yahoo and search link:www.yourblog.com and find a few web-sites linking back to you (forget Google, unless you have loads of links). Copy and paste three of these into the form. I have no idea if it really helps, but the question is there, so in case it does…

4. assume up a few suitable tags and enter them, plus select the three categories that match your website the best. Now, check the details and press submit.

Now, they will email you a claim code that you have to put into your weblog. This seems to be the biggest sticking point for getting listed – positioning this claim token. The problem is here that Technorati seems to do a double check.

First, they spider the website to check the claim token exists and second they look for it in your RSS feed. The second makes sense, as I will explain in a moment. But why then do the first? If both checks used the RSS feed then an error message could be generated. I assume that this is the reason that plenty of claims are failing and why a lot of websites are not getting listed. Let me explain more!

The reason to use the RSS feed rather than just spidering the website is because anyone might place a comment in a site, which could include the claim token. You have to be able to update the posts to be able to get it onto the RSS feed.

So what causes the claim problem? Well, plenty of bloggers set the RSS feed to merely display a summary, rather than the full post. If the claim token is too far down the post, then it won’t be read by Technorati. Therefore, your weblog doesn’t get listed properly.

So, when you receive your claim token, create a new post and put the token in the first sentence. I would recommend within the first 30 words at the most. Also, (in WordPress), go to settings, reading and ensure the RSS feed is giving the entire post. A belt and braces job, but better to make sure that. Once you start to see a Authority appearing, you might reset your feed to summary just if you prefer.

After that, you should be ready to get listed. You only need to get other bloggers to mention you in their posts!