My blogs are registered with Technorati so when I noticed that my blogging tips site here at http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com had not been crawled by Technorati spiders for 15 days, and that some of my posts had not been indexed, I set out to solve the mystery.
As all wordpress.com blogs are equipped with pingomatic this should not be occurring. Immediately, upon publishing a post a ping should be going out automatically. Three of my 3 posts did not appear at Technorati so I pinged them manually but got no results:
Content theft: The come and get it solution
How to copyright your digital works
Spotting a splog
I sent in a Technorati support request and received this reply:
“Please accept our apologies for the delay in getting back to you. We are currently experiencing a backlog in Support, but are working hard to address everyone.
Note that in the past, simply pinging Technorati initiated an indexing of a site. This open door policy meant a lot of splogs and non-blogs would enter the system and masquerade as blogs. In order to better filter out spam as well as inadvertent pings to Technorati, we have implemented review measures to evaluate a site prior to indexing it as a blog.
Also your feed only contains summary data and we require a full content feed. For more information on how to configure your blog for better indexing, please see: support.technorati.com/faq/topic/34?replies=7
I think the reason you are losing posts is because we use the feed together with the blog to index your site and you have limited your feed to only two posts. This means if there is a delay in indexing on our side for any reason or if you post more than two posts in a day, we won’t pick up the posts that are no longer on the feed.”
Step 1: Increase the number of items in the RSS feed
Armed with this information regarding the indexing delay and also regarding the number of items in my RSS feed I have increased them from 2 to 10.
Step 2: Set the RSS feed to full
As far as opening the RSS feed to full feed, given the problems with blog scrapers I decided against that. My RSS feeds will remain on “summary”. Consequently, I do expect that from time to time some of my posts will not be indexed by Technorati spiders. I’m willing to accept that because I rarely ever get referrals fro Technorati.
Questions for readers:
- Is your blog registered with Technorati?
- Do you get many Technorati referrals?
- Have you noticed a delay when it comes to Technorati indexing your site?
- How many items do you have your RSS feeds set to access?
- Is your RSS feed set to “full” or to “summary”?
Reference: Technorati Is Indexing Me!
Related posts found in this blog:
Promote Your Blog: Increase Traffic
Technorati: The Six Month Link Window
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Ann
October 28, 2008
I’ve only recently registered with Technorati (well, I registered a long time ago and then did nothing. When I logged on last week my site hadn’t been indexed in 9 days).
As for my RSS feed, it is currently set to full. I read a lot of sites in RSS readers and I rarely click through unless I want to comment. I was skipping a lot of articles on summary feeds and realized that a lot of people were likely doing that to mine. Now that is probably niche specific since my biggest blog is a book blog and that’s mostly what I was reading.
Book reviews generally start with a summary of a review so a summary feed is kind of useless. I’m a skimmer so I would skip to the actual review in a full feed, but I wasn’t about to click all the summary feeds to see what the review was like. The feeds that are title only I tend to delete since they are essentially useless.
I’ve recently started another blog that is not book related and I’m still deciding what to do about that RSS feed (there are few visitors now so it’s not a huge issue but it is something I need to decide).
As for how many items in my feed, I think it is set to the wordpress default (whatever that is). I haven’t noticed much traffic from Technorati (and haven’t been actively doing anything to get it either so …).
Meka
October 29, 2008
This is good to know. I always ping my blog from tecnorati though. I dont use wordpress but its good you let other wordpress users know about this issue and how to fix it. Informative post.
Steve Rebooted
October 29, 2008
Honestly, I’ve given up on Technorati. You’re not alone with the pinging issue, as I’ve heard other’s gripe (including myself). Technorati hasn’t updated my site since JUNE, despite my pinging through technorati!
timethief
October 29, 2008
@Ann
Thanks so much for sharing your practices with us. I appreciate it.
You can choose how many items to display in your RSS feeds on a wordpress blog here -> Dashboard -> Settings -> Reading
scroll down to
Syndication feeds show the most recent ___ posts
Then click “save changes”
timethief
October 29, 2008
@meka
I’m in the habit of checking to see whether or not my posts appear at Technorati. If they don’t appear I manually ping. However, due note that they are backlogged from time to time. Thanks for the visit and comment.
timethief
October 29, 2008
@steverebooted
No indexing since June sounds like more than a backlog issue to me. Have you considered sending in a support request?
carolynlee
October 31, 2008
I didn’t realize that WordPress was auto pinging Technorati and always manually pinged it. I did notice that the results were very spotty. I have my RSS settings set to display 25 posts in summary format. Hadn’t really thought about the blog scraping issue but wanted readers to click through to read the entire post so that the viewing would be captured by the site stats.
timethief
November 1, 2008
@carloynlee
All wordpress blog have pingomatic so when you publish the ping goes out. The good news is that Technorati seems to have conquered the backlog at least temporarily. Blog scraping may be an issue when you have your RSS feeds on full. They are harvested by bots. Some readers say they prefer “full” posts on feed. That’s nice but they don’t click through then and your posts accumulate no stats. At best all of this is a balancing act.