Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either.

The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done.

I checked back a week later and nothing since that day had been indexed. I sent another ticket and posted on the bulletin board the same day. Three days afterwards I received a reply to the first email and was told the blog had been indexed, what they didn’t say was it was done shortly after I made the problem known on the bulletin board. I have since had to make more than half a dozen posts in order to get the blog regularly indexed. Who ever is in charge of doing that does it pretty speedily and should be rewarded for it.

I have received several answers as to why this is happening from the board admin, and none of them are very likely. First I wasn’t given an answer. The second time I was told there was just a delay in indexing. The next time they blamed it on the number of anchor links some of my posts contain. They have blamed it on the number of tags. They have always fixed it an done an auto update but they refuse to address the key issue many bloggers are having. Neither the automatic ping services nor the manual ping at Technorati are working for many of us.

As I said this isn’t just my problem either. If you surf over to the Technorati discussion board you will find quite a few people who have gone a couple of days without being tracked to those who have gone weeks. One blogger reports his blog hadn’t been indexed for more than a year. I have no idea how often he posts, but Technorati simply can’t say his problem was a simple delay in indexing.

If you are a serious blogger with a Technorati account don’t just assume it has been working for you, go check it out. I know some of you are asking what the big deal is. First off if you are displaying the Technorati logo on your blog, you are advertising them in exchange for a service which includes indexing and providing search traffic. If they aren’t providing that, then they are operating on a fraudulent principal and should be paying you for the advertising. Secondly they are getting paid advertising because of the service they provide, I think the advertisers that pay them should be made aware that they aren’t getting everything they are paying for. I know I certainly would if I were paying big bucks to advertise on a site making claims of tracking a hundred million plus blogs, but only updating three quarters of their claim. The fact is they are a corporation and all corporations private or public need to be held accountable to proper standards.

I won’t debate whether they have the right or not to deny tracking of individual blogs, but the fact is they have an obligation to tell people that their blogs will not be tracked. They don’t even have to provide a reason, they just have to be honest about doing it. Of course none of us know if this is a softwarer glitch, which they have never admitted to, but they need to come out and say something one way or another. Failure to do or say something is the best way for them to lose their credibility. I can live with it being some sort of technical problem, we have all experienced those, but the fact is something needs to be done and done soon.

I was researching this topic for you when I ran across this excellent article and decided just to give you the whole thing.  it has some stuyff that I am going to go put in practice on my other blogs right now so have a good day.

How to Get Inbound Links from Government and University Sites   by Dr. Deepak Dutta

The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes.

If your site is a good fit for outbound links from government sites, start with usa.gov site. It is a central information hub for everything government. On the bottom of the page, you will see About Us and Contact Us links. Read their linking policy by clicking on the About Us before you contact them.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the US government sites only. Explore the possibilities of getting links from foreign government sites also. But keep in mind that your site should provide some values to citizenry of those countries and people wanting to do with them.

For example, most government embassy sites don’t display their embassy addresses in interactive maps. If your site pulls their addresses displayed in simple texts in a web page and place those addresses on Google maps for interactivity, you can contact them to put a link back to your site. Explain to them that your site adds additional value to their visitors by providing richer user experience.

College and university sites provide a good opportunity to develop some authoritative inbound links. The key here is to provide services geared towards students. You may also be able to get links if a faculty member is interested in your contents.

Don’t start spamming university forums, guest books, etc. People may attack your site and bring it down, report to your web host company or domain registrar. You will lose your credibility and reputation. Try to establish relationship by helping others. Let them know that you know your topics and are willing to share with them.

If your site provides some valuable services to students, approach the appropriate university authority for linking. For example, if you have a tool that compares student loans from different sources and suggests the good ones depending on a student’s financial situation, university loan office will be willing to link to your site as a resource.

If you have a blog with original and regularly updated contents that talk about impact of the technology on the society, you may approach a faculty in sociology to link to your site from his or her home page located in the university server.

Government and university sites provide good opportunities for developing inbound links if your website has a match with their requirements. The key to that is quality contents and useful web tools. Once you meet their requirements, it is worth pursuing these entities for spreading your website links to them.

About the Author

Deepak has provided free online marketing tools like free classifieds and free ads sites for more than a decade, followed by article marketing and social media link building tools.

When you want to talk about doing things right and really getting traffic to your blogs, the first thing you need to do is get on Technorati listed.  If you want to talk about authority getting I have posted on it at http://bradstinyworld.com a few times and those posts will eventually make their way over here too.  I explain how to really raise your authority and get noticed.  While sometimes I might seem like I am all talk, let me tell you a week ago I had an authority of six on Brad’s Tiny World Leaving me a modest spot in the top 1.5 million blogs of the more 9 million they have registered.  After six days of carefully crafted posts and replies on other websites I jumped past my previous authority of 7 to an authority of 9 putting me in the top 800k blogs.  The last time I looked at my authority was 36 hours ago, I am not a comfortable surprising 12. resting at 674k  This is what following my advice can do for you too.   There are a lot of blogs behind me, but there are a lot more behind me too.

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