This weekend has been a busy one as I work on several computers, wiping them all and then setting them up fresh; but I do have time to get online as I sit waiting for various installations to finish.

I had posted previously that the website Technorati would not index this blog. Technorati is a site that keeps track of every known blog, and allows you to create a list of those blogs you follow so that you can read them all in one place. It also ranks blogs based on links from other blogs, frequency of posting, popularity, and other criteria I don’t know. Therefore, adding a blog I visit often to my favorites there lets the author(s) know I appreciate their work.

One of the main reasons for my previous postings is that I found when searching that a lot of people reported problems with Technorati indexing their blog; but not many ever said what was the solution. I therefore promised that I would follow up with my posting, just in case someone came here as a result of searching when they had issues.

I’m happy to report that my issues with Technorati are fixed. Sadly, I cannot say how they became fixed. I had emailed Technorati support, who promised to get back to me and even stated that if I hadn’t heard from them within a week, I could then request an update as to when they would be able to get to me. Reading the experiences of others indicated that often support had fixed the issue, but that sometimes it took weeks of reminders before support looked at their issue. I had decided to give it about 10 days before I bothered them again, and right about then the issue suddenly resolved itself. I had made no changes on my end that should have helped, and since Technorati never got a hold of me, I have no idea if they did something that resolved the issue on their end.

However, I have since noticed poor performance on their part in other areas. My wife’s blog will sometimes be listed in Technorati as not having been updated in five or six days, even though she has made at least two posts a day. This will be despite the fact that we can see the Technorati spiders visiting her blog’s feed multiple times a day. According to Technorati, my sister-in-law’s blog did not even exist until I manually pinged it today, after which it immediately said not only that the blog existed, but that it had already noticed when looking at three other blogs that they linked to it. I would think that a site that tries to index all blogs would notice one on Blogger, and especially notice it if it was linked to in other blogs it has indexed. Similarly, my stepson’s blog existed in their index, but Technorati had not noticed any updates in it for 77 days until I manually pinged it today.

So it appears that perhaps Technorati is suffering pains from the ambitious task they have tried to undertake. It is a good thing that I am not too concerned with my ranking there, or these would really get to me.

I haven’t posted in a few days as I’ve been busy trying to fix a few things with my blog. One of the issues is with regards to one of the biggest trackers of blogs, a site called Technorati. This is a site that indexes millions of blogs and lets you then search blogs for specific topics, watch for certain tags, see how blogs rank against each other, and much more. I use it to find certain things, such as to see what people are blogging about when they tag their blogs with Abbotsford.

So now that I am also doing a blog, I figured I should “claim” it on Technorati. This was easily done, but while I am now listed, Technorati will not add my posts to their index. It is as if I have a blog with no posts at all.

This is often due to bad HTML/XHTML, the text based language that this and every webpage are written. Search engines such as Technorati and Google send out spiders to read and index webpages; which is their geeky way to say they have their computers specifically search pages they want to add or update in their index. A spider can have problems with bad HTML, so I submitted this blog to an HTML validator. It found 139 errors in the page!

A lot of the errors were in HTML code that I cannot even access, code that Blogger puts into every page. Since thousands of Blogger sites are indexed by Technorati, that can’t be it.

Many of the other errors are in the template, which I can access, but I am using a Blogger supplied template that I have modified a bit and similar code is in all of their templates. Never-the-less, I changed templates to see if that would make a difference in case the specific template I choose was the issue, and that did not resolve the issue.

Next I went one by one through every post, widget and other add-ons I have on this page and saved them, wiped them blank, and tested by manually pinging Technorati to tell it I had updated the page. After each unsuccessful attempt, I then restored my saved copy of that component.

So all that work, and no results. A search of the web shows that many people of had this issue, and if they could not find errors in their HTML, then they simply had to hope that Technorati’s support would help them. Some report great service from support, others not. I have therefore emailed Technorati support and asked for their help, but it can take a week or two just for them to first respond. I will post the results of my request for help.

My other hope is that the web community can help me faster than Technorati. I will therefore submit this post to a number of sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us and see how can solve it first. If you know what’s wrong and how to fix it, please let me know through the comments, and also let me know how you got here so I know which community to credit.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, validation, Blogger, Digg, Del.icio.us

Update: My promised update can be found here, though it is of limited use to others in the same situation.