Three Lesser Known Technorati Optimization Tips

You probably know by now that you need to claim and ping your blog to start moving up the Technorati ranks. But what else should you know about this blog search engine?

1. It's okay to ping other site's on their behalf. This topic caused some controversy when I suggested using this blog search engine optimization strategy back in January. Technorati explains that this is an acceptable optimization technique on their support pages:

I know that some blogs are linking to me, but they are not appearing in search results for my blog. Why?
In order for Technorati to pick up updates and links from sites, we rely on a ping from those sites to alert our spiders of those updates, as well as links. If links to you from these blog do not appear in your search, it may be because they have not pinged Technorati yet. To alert us of these links you can initiate a ping for these blogs by going to our Ping Page. You can use this page to notify Technorati of updates from other blogs, as well as yours.

That makes sense because Technorati's site improves at they index more content and more links.

2. Your ranking is based on the last 180 days. Technorati stops count inbound links acquired more than 180 days ago in your site's rankings. I imagine this is done to give preference to sites that are both popular and current. Here is how Technorati explains it:

Why is my link count is only increasing a little, or is decreasing?

Technorati calculates link count by looking at all links from the past 6 months. That means your rank will change daily based upon your blog's activity from 180 days ago up to today. As older links fall off your count and new links are added, your link count may increase, decrease, or stay the same.

3. rel="bookmark" tags helps Technorati Identify Individual Posts. Technorati has an easier time understanding your site's structure if you guide their spider to your posts permanent locations. Adding rel="bookmark" to your permalinks helps with this process:

How can I better identify each post?
Technorati breaks up your weblog's home page into smaller sections such as posts and sidebars. You can help Technorati's spiders properly identify a unique post and its proper link destination by adding a link with a defined relationship of "bookmark" for each post. For example:

<a href="http://blog.bloghost.com/post1" rel="bookmark">Post title</a>

3a. Bonus tip related to #3. If you haven't already, consider hyperlinking the blog post titles on your homepage, category, and archive pages to your individual post pages (permalink locations). People expect the titles to be clickable, yet they are not clickable by default on some popular blogging platforms such as Movable Type, Typepad, and Blogger. Look for the <a href=> code surrounding your permalink links and copy/paste that around your post headlines. It may take some work to the formatting right, but it's worth it. It also helps with search engine optimization because it helps search engines determine what they linked-to page is about based on the anchor text (permalink isn't very descriptive compared to the post headlines).

By the way, none of the above tips will help sites that aren't generating valuable content on their blogs. Creating quality content is the most important step in search engine optimization.

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