Problems with Technorati seem to have been escalating in the last couple of months or so. Just search Google or even Technorati itself. But Technorati now appear to be turning the corner, or over a new leaf, to mix the metaphors...
I've detailed some problems with Technorati's tag pages before, and commented on their support issues, which others had reported to me and which I'd also experienced first hand myself.
To boot, since early July Technorati had stopped indexing my blog completely. Period. You couldn't even find my July/August posts by searching on Technorati, never mind checking the relevant tag pages. The initial response to me, and to other bloggers from what I hear, was that the problem was down to our blogs not using valid enough XHTML code. This made little sense to me as it had all worked fine before these problems started, even when my blog's code was equally (indeed even more) invalid. I know I wasn't the only person who then spent hours trying to get their template code as valid as possible and continually pinging Technorati, to no avail. My emails to support, pointing out that there was still a problem, went unanswered for about a month.
Finally, I decided to contact Mr Sifry direct, and I'm pleased to say that my blog started getting indexed again pretty much overnight, although the dates of the posts reported on Technorati were of course weeks if not months after their actual dates. Still, better late than never. They said there was indeed apparently something awry with how they indexed my blog (and I suspect some other blogs too), but that Technorati had deployed new and better parsing code recently and my blog was being picked up again. So - as I'd thought - it wasn't the fault of me or my HTML.
Today, Mr Sifry has posted acknowledging the problems they've had with support. Good on him. He says "We're busy expanding out our support capabilities, and also putting together tools to make it easier for users to help answer their own questions before a Technorati support staffer has to get involved, and we've already made a bunch of fixes and feature enhancements to help fix the most common support requests, like fixes in our blog claiming code". Bring it on!
Technorati Tags: Technorati, support, customer service, consumer issues, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience
7 comments:
Technorati has just added another whistle on a car with a broken engine.
I'm having no joy at all getting any response from technorati... and my blog ain't getting indexed in the meantime.
From the four support tickets i sent to Technorati, one got answered after about a month.
On Mr. Sifrys Blog was a comment about the poor support and i also placed a comment there, that was never posted and an email to Mr. Sifry about this is still - you might guess - unanswered...
I should follow up and say that my saga had a happy ending, as I chronicle here, but not without the intervention of David Sifry himself. As I point out, that's "kind of cool, but it would be easier on him if his minions were more efficient about responding to support quieres."
I agree, Technorati clearly need to sort out their support. People shouldn't have to go to Mr Sifry in order to get basic stuff attended to. Let's see how much longer this carries on for..
Im in very much the same situation with 2 of my 5 blogs - Can't figure out how the selection process goes on who get's indexed and who doesn't. Especially when it's the SAME person blogging!
Thanks for your comment Gayla. It's not the blogger, or even the blog - it's the content of the post.
Technorati's system just doesn't "like" certain content, and even they don't know why their tagging system won't pick up certain posts - see this post. Your best bet is to report the problem posts to Technorati to give them more data to fix the problem.
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