A Consuming Experience

Someone asked if there was any news about the problems with blogosphere search engine Technorati not picking up the tags in certain blog posts to display on their tag pages, even when they've indexed the rest of the post. From my previous experiments, it's at least in part to do with the content of your post - if there is something about the content of the post which Technorati's system doesn't like, whatever that may be (no one seems to have figured that out yet!), it won't pick up the tags in it.

Unfortunately, the issue is still ongoing, even just looking at my own blog alone. Since my last post about the problems, I've noticed several posts of mine which haven't got picked up (I check this quickly by going to their Improbulus tag pages and comparing the list of posts there against the lists in my archive pages e.g. for August, etc). You'll see that even last week a post got missed out, although most of the problem posts are from May or earlier so maybe it's improving a bit. The posts missing from their tag pages are:

• Blogger Beta: new features review - first look
• Bloggers: protected as journalists from revealing sources
• LG Chocolate KG800 mobile phone review 1: overview, tips
• Playing MP3s: Delicious Playtagger script link, change icons
• Blogger spam: nextsplogs should be tackled too
• Next blog queue traffic theft: Blogger wake up, it's nextsplog abuse
• Blogger: bookmarklet - flag Blogspot splogs hiding navbar or flag
• Blogger: show only excerpts from long posts

Now, as I recently mentioned, they've identified at least one source of the problem - there may well be more than one cause, who knows.

It seems that sometimes Technorati have index glitches where they've picked up your tags from your post correctly, but then lost them. To compound the problem, their system treats the post as having been indexed before (because it has been - they've just dropped the tags afterwards on their system) - so they won't pick up the lost tags even when you update your blog, not even if the problem post is still on your main page (Technorati only indexes content that's in your feed i.e. on your main page). If you can't get them to find the lost tags or pick them up again before your problem post disappears off your main blog page, you're stuffed - the tags in that post will never ever appear on Technorati's tag pages.

I guess that, as before, all we can do is to stay cool and not get too Technoratty, but keep reporting the problem pages to Technorati - check your "metag" ("meblogging" tag) pages frequently, and let them know ASAP before any problem post vanishes from your main page.

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