Technorati, Tags, and Sitefeeds
A little nugget of knowledge I've recently come across that dramatically altered my understanding of the way Technorati works, and so changed the way I do things on the blog.
Did you know that Technorati scans your blog feed, and not your blog website?
Maybe that's obvious to everyone else, but it cames as a surprise to me. Then again, it shouldn't have. Technorati and other blog search engines are evaluating only the blog content of your website. The RSS or Atom feed is the perfect delivery system to eliminate all that other stuff.
But my website is my blog, right?
Not really. The blog is the content -- the list of posts. Everything else -- the blogrolls, the archives, the banner, the ads -- is logically outside of the blog. That was part of the way I think of my blog, which in part drove the redesign. By considering the blog just one component of a larger website, it was easy to imagine a new home page, a separate links page, and so on.
But back to Technorati. That Technorati just reads the feed immediately implies several things. First, your webpage has to have autodiscover enabled. That's easy, but you ought to double check. Do you have a feed reader incorporated into your browser? If so, when you are on your webpage, does the button activate? If it stays off, you don't have autodiscovery set up.
The code for autodiscovery is simple:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Steve Janke: Angry in the Great White North" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ angrygwnrss20">
Put that code somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags, rebuild, and you are set to go. You can have multiple autodiscovery links -- depending on the application, a user might be offered each of the feeds to choose from, or it will grab the first one.
It's important to check for another reason. Are you using a service like FeedBurner to repackage your feed? If your autodiscover tag is still pointing at the vanilla XML feed file, then those users who grabbed your feed using autodiscovery instead of the FeedBurner URL you offered on the webpage are getting the wrong feed.
Finally, what is in your feed? In particular, are the Technorati tags in there?
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/mesh" rel="tag">mesh</a>
If they aren't, then how will Technorati be able to index your article properly? Needless to say, when I gained this insight, I immediately ripped apart my XML template in order to get the tag information appended to the end of the excerpts I was feeding to Technorati.
Maybe Technorati spiders your online, tag-rich posting after getting the URL from the feed, but I don't think so. So if you use Technorati, and you're wondering just where all your traffic is, double check the tags and where they appear. You might be surprised.
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Comments
Shoa!! Completely new language, Steve, to a mere reader of your blog!!
I often wondered why I couldn't comment on your blog, and very often couldn't even access it. I suspect that you've explained why, very elegantly, though I don't understand a word of your explanation!
Oh well. My main concern is getting onto your blog, reading it, then commenting if I'm in the mood. I hope that all of these new discoveries on your part results in my being able to access your blog and comment on the different threads at all times.
Posted by: 'been around the block at November 22, 2006 06:15 PM
I meant Whoa!! One success in the bag, Steve. I accessed your blog and I was able to post a comment, on the first try.
Posted by: 'been around the block at November 22, 2006 06:16 PM
There have been serious problems related to the old DNS used by the mu.nu community. That was migrated to a new service, and a number of issues have been fixed, including a nagging problem I have been struggling with for months in access the administration panel.
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