Technorati, a blog searh engine and ranking site

Technorati is a popular blog search engine and also index and rank blogs. Previously, MySpace blogs were not indexed, but now they are included. If you go to Technorati, you will find a search box right at the top:



You can type in topics you are interested in into the search box and find blogs that contain the topics you are interested in. If you are interested in getting traffic, it is important to register a Technorati account and claim your blog. You can also see a list of my blogs claimed in Technorati and their ranking:



As you can see, my most popular blog (this blog) has been ranked highest among all the blogs with a ranking (Authority) of 469.

It is also important to include Technorati tags for your posts so that surfers searching for those keywords can find your post. (a tag is simply keyword or category (called label by Blogger) describing the subject matter or topic of a post. Previously, Movable Type, WordPress and TypePad have an advantage over Blogger because they can categories for their posts, but the old Blogger didn't and Technorati uses these categories as Technorati tags. But now Google has introduce Labels which is their name for Categories or Tags, and these are also included as Technorati tags. It is important that you add labels to your posts to increase the chances of a surfer searching for something find your blog. You can also manually add Technorati tags at the bottom of each posts. The difference between Technorati tags and Blogger labels is that the Technorati tag link to the individual post while Blogger label will take a searcher to the Label page which will include all the posts with the same label. However, I read from Technorati forum that posts over 6 months may not be included in Technorati tag search results.

Each time you publish a new post, you should ping Technorati to update their index. You can sign into your Technorati account and use their ping to ping Technorati either by pinging the blog listed or entering the blog URL into the Ping box at the bottom.



If you don't want the trouble of signing into your Technorati account, you can go to Ping Technorati and just type or paste in your blog URL.

I normally uses Pingoat each time I publish a new post. Pingoat pings a number of services which include Technorati:



I believe because of this practice, my blogs are updated in Technorati as you can see from the screenshot (third one) which showed that my blog "Blogger for Dummies" was updated 3 hours ago, and I didn't go to Technorati to ping that blog.