Technorati: how to check when Technorati last indexed your blog

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The Technorati blog have announced that Technorati have updated their ping page, as Stowe Boyd has noted.

To "ping" a search engine means to ask them to revisit your blog or webpage to re-index it so it can be searched for on their site. You'd usually do this because your content has changed and normally on receiving a ping they will send a spider or bot to "crawl" your pages.

To me the most useful change is this: if you've signed up and logged in to Technorati and have claimed your blog on Technorati, when you go to their ping page you will see that against the name of each claimed blog it gives the number of days or hours ago that Technorati last indexed or crawled your blog, like this:


This is obviously a good way to check that Technorati have indeed been indexing your blog regularly. (But remember you won't see that info unless you've both signed in AND claimed your blog.)

You'll see that there's also now an "Update ping" button to manually ping Technorati for each of your claimed blogs - so they've made it easier to do a manual ping from their ping page, or alternatively indeed you can do that from the Blogs tab (visible once you're logged in, which summarises info about your claimed blogs) as the button is there too:


However, you really don't need to ping Technorati manually for many blogging platforms. It's much easier to set things up so that Technorati is automatically pinged whenever you publish a new post, and Technorati have provided step by step instructions on how to configure this for major platforms like:

1. b2
2. Blogger
3. Ecto
4. MarsEdit
5. Movable Type
6. Nucleus
7. Radio UserLand
8. TypePad
9. WordPress

In Blogger, at least, this should be automatically set up for you anyway so you shouldn't need to do anything, but if you want to you could check your Blogger ping configuration just in case, and change it if necessary.

My wishlist item? It's great that Technorati now provide this info, but it would be even better if Technorati included the "Updated X days/hours ago" information on the Blogs page of logged in members, rather than us having to visit the ping page to see it. That would be the logical place for it, to me. (The ping page link is also not the easiest to find as it's oddly enough hidden at the bottom of Technorati's pages in the same line as the copyright and other info, rather than with their main links).

And while it's good that they are regularly indexing, I wish they would fix the problems with their tag pages (or maybe tags indexing or tags database), which clearly people are still experiencing - I've found myself that my post on how to offer different lengths of feed to your subscribers isn't showing up on their tag pages though it's clearly on their index. I don't know if it's because I included code in that post, but some guidance as to what can break their system would be helpful so we know what to avoid.

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Technorati Tags: Technorati, ping, ping Technorati, search, searching, search engines, indexing, blog, blogs, blogging, blogging tools, blog tools, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience