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Sunday 11 December 2005

Technorati: how to check when Technorati last indexed your blog






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.


Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

8 comments:

ChickyBabe said...

Another useful post. I've been manually pinging for sometime and lately decided to see what happens if I don't. All seems to be in order, except as you mention, not all tags show up. I've seen this happen on both my blogs, and I hope it's a temporary problem.

Athique Ahmed said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Athique Ahmed said...

The Technorati update thing first showed '18 days ago' when I first saw it, which is clearly wrong, since I update everyday...well pretty much...and ping them left right and center

What's even stranger is it now shows '20 days ago'. It's going the wrong way

:o)

Improbulus said...

Sorry, just picked up on this. It's odd, I have no clue how Technorati do their stuff. I'm still having posts not showing up on their tag pages, and no reply from anyone in support...

I'm not sure manual pinging works better than automatic, when I and others have had problems before with tag pages, manual pinging to perdition has achieved nothing at all.

Amanda said...

I'm having no luck with pinging either - lasted updated 8 days ago, and I've posted 6 or 7 posts since then, clicked "Update ping" twice in that time, with no luck. Oh well...

Love your blog - I have Consuming Experience on constant alert via BlogLines - really really informative.

Improbulus said...

Dreamweaver, thanks for your kind comment, I'm very glad my blog has proved useful to you.

I'm afraid however I don't know what to suggest with the pinging problem. Technorati is certainly recognising my updates pretty instantaneously, though I don't use Update Ping myself but the automated ping via Blogger.

Have you set that up? Also in your Dashboard, Settings, Publishing tab, is Notify Weblogs.com set to Yes?

Not sure that would necessarily help as you're pinging Technorati direct but I don't know what else to suggest. I've had occasional problems with Technorati not adding my posts to all the relevant tagged pages too, but not with this. Have you emailed Technorati support?

Anonymous said...

"Last updates 130 days ago"

http://www.technorati.com/search/adivina.blogspot.com

People, don't panic, always somebody is worst :(

saludos
Mario

Improbulus said...

Mario, yep! I'd suggest you contact Technorati support ASAP to try to get it sorted.