

Revisiting Technorati’s Blog Finder & Listing Issues

Gary Price wrote earlier of Technorati’s new Technorati Blog
Finder
, along with some issues with the new beta service. For our Search Engine Watch members, the
Revisiting Technorati’s Blog
Finder & Listing Issues
article I’ve now posted take a longer look at the new service, how it operates and ways blog owners can consider improving their performance within
it. In summary, the article covers:

  • How the service provides a new way for those seeking blogs about particular topics — rather than blog posts — to locate them.
     
  • A step-by-step look at how site owners can set their tags to anything they want, which directly impacts which tag categories they show up in.
     
  • Strategies on how to select the best 20 tags for your blog.
     
  • How "searches" on Blog Finder only bring up tags specifically matched with those words — and how you remain essentially invisible for anything you haven’t specifically
    tagged your blog for.
     
  • How sites are listed by Technorati rank, derived from looking at all the links on the home pages of blogs that point at your blog.
     
  • How the tagging system brings back the "bad old days" of the meta keywords tag, where you have to include singular, plural, stemmed and alternative terms. IE, want to show
    up for things related to blogging? You’d need to tag yourself blog, blogs, blogging and blogger!
     
  • How anyone can claim any blog at the moment to tag it however they like, even if they don’t verify ownership. Don’t panic, in that they don’t seem to be able to overwrite
    any settings done on a blog you’ve claim. Rather, they can set up a parallel claim and put you in categories/tags they want.
     
  • How searches currently don’t match titles and descriptions of tags, meaning that you can’t find them by name — but this is something Technorati says it will fix in the
    future. "We wanted to provide the most value up-front as the first product feature but we are certainly not finished with the product and take our beta badges seriously," said
    Technorati community manager Niall Kennedy.
     
  • How stemming and other consolidation may come in the future, so that people don’t have to think of every related variation of a topic.
     
  • How a bug last Friday that seemed to prevent changes from being saved has been cleared up.
     
  • How relevancy issues remain, in that people can deliberately misassign their blogs or accidentally get categories in areas they really aren’t relevant for.

As a blog owner, should you even care about Technorati? After all, it’s taken mounting criticisms over performance issues,
as many are aware. Despite this, the service remains popular and something that many in the blog world care about. It’s easy to improve your listings in the new service at the
moment and worth a few minutes to do so.

As someone seeking blogs, the new finder service helps Technorati counter some criticism its taken
over its Top 100 list. The plus to the Technorati system is that it allows, as it says, for people to make mini Top 100 lists in any particular topic.

That’s what someone like Robert Scoble wants, but the tagging system it’s based on leaves all types of
issues. My article for members, as Gary’s previous review of Blog Finder, shows the problems you get with having to think of plural and stemming terms, not to mention alternative terms (search marketing or search engine marketing —
you’ve gotta do both). Josh Hallett covers some further criticisms as well here, plus points to a variety of other observations worth checking out.

Still want more top blog lists? There’s the Feedster Top 500 list that came up
recently
and there’s the existing Bloglines list.

Also be sure to check out Yahoo’s blog & feed finding service. I feel it’s poorly known, in particular because Yahoo needs to do a much better job in
making it visible.

My past Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update post explains the service more and the
Submitting To Yahoo’s Feed Search post looks at webmaster issues plus touches on how it provides the
type of mini-Top 100 lists that some want.

If you’re a SEW member, a longer version with many more details on
the submitting side is here.

Want to discuss Blog Finder? Please visit our Search Engine Watch Forums and start a thread!

Related reading

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