Technorati hates me

I've blogged about my problems with Technorati before. I feel that either Technorati hates me specifically, or there are some serious problems with the site. Unfortunately it remains the only way to promote your blog that doesn't invovle begging people for links, so I'll have to live with the promblems for now.

Seriously though, if Technorati aims to be "the Google of blogs" they need to get their act together. All you hear from them is that the bloggosphere is expanding at such-and-such a rate and spam is a big problem etc. You don't hear Google complaining about the web expanding or how much link-spamming (Search Engine Optimization is the polite name for it) there is, they just get on with it and provide a reliable service that works as advertised most of the time. Technorati isn't as slow in basic page-response time as it used to be, but when it comes to updating it's index with freshly published content - the whole point of it - it fails miserably, at least for me.

For me Technorati is a way to advertise my blog in the hopes that more people will read it. I expect most people to find it via a search for some related term. Since search results are by default ordered by time since the article in question was posted, it's important that Technorati starts returning your posts in searchs while they are still fresh. If other blogger's posts are picked up sooner and there are a lot of posts on the same subject, your post could be off the bottom of the page before it even gets in the index. My blog software - Pivot - pings a bunch of servers, including Technorati, as soon as I post. For a long time I didn't think this was working. I'd go to the manual ping page on Technorati (see image) and it would still say my blog hadn't been pinged. In the image to the right, I'd posted to The Racing Blog in the last few minutes. At the bottom of that page it says that it "will now go and check.... for new content". I'm guessing it doesn't update the "Updated 6 hours ago" part until it's actually done that check. The problem is that it takes so long for my blogs that it can be at least half an hour before that check is performed. And when it does find the new posting, it uses the date on the post (presumably by cross-referencing it with the RSS feed) and determines that it's already 30+ minutes old.

That would be bad enough but often, even when Technorati does deign to examine your website, it updates that last-posting time, but the new posts it finds don't actually make it into the search index for some reason. In the screen-shot you can see that Technorati thinks The Racing Blog's last post was "Silly Season Roundup" posted 18 hours ago when the screen-shot was taken. Yet Technorati has definitely visited the blog and read the true most recent post because the most recent outbound link (highlighted with a red loop in the screen-shot) is from the true most recent post about Giancarlo Fisichella signing a new deal to stay at Renault, even though Technorati doesn't list that post (and I searched for it as well). After a couple of hours I deleted my original post and added it anew and this time Technoroati managed to both read the page and add the post to it's index and only in about 30 minutes. It's hardly the "real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere" they claim it is.