Technorati indexing, Google searching and self-hosting
I was pretty shocked (and excited) when my Technorati authority jumped over 153 points in less than three months. I’ve mentioned before that I really don’t give much of a damn about my stats themselves. It’s nice to have grown out of being read by three people to the level of readership I have now, but as I indicated before:
When I get bored of learning about tech issues, social media and blogging, you can rest assured of one thing: I’ll quit. Yes, I will. Why? Because as many people have always recommended, I should do this because I am passionate about it. And I’m passionate about learning about social media and about making new friends. THAT is what I love doing. The rest, is just icing in the cake.
Technorati doesn’t help me make new friends, of course. But it provides me a barometer against which to assess how my content is being read. Still, as I mentioned in the previous post (the one I linked just above), it’s the learning that makes it all worth it. So imagine my surprise when I was exploring my new Dashboard (WP.com and WP.org have slightly different Dashboards) and OH SURPRISE…. I had the option of having a semi-private blog ticked! When I moved over to my new host, I didn’t even think about the implications. Well, it turns out that my blog hasn’t been indexed by Google nor Technorati for the past two weeks.
So the question I posed on Twitter the other day (why isn’t my authority increasing when I’m clearly being linked by new blogs?) loses all value because, well, I wasn’t letting Technorati OR Google index my blog. Which actually might also provide an explanation to why my page views on UrbanSpoon have decreased. Since my blog isn’t being indexed, my restaurant reviews don’t appear in the first few pages of Google.
And if my thoughts are true, as of today, you should be see changes about that right about now. No, I haven’t fixed my stats package yet. But that’s something I’ll deal with after fixing a few other things that aren’t blogging related. Like, you know, spending time with a civilian friend.
[UPDATE - Yes, I was right. I am now being indexed by Google AND Technorati. And my Technorati authority went up to what I thought it would. I *love* being right about something techie!]
Related posts:
I agree with you about stats. It’s kind of like blog taxes. You don’t really want to do it, but you know you should, and you could learn something from them.
Welcome back to the blogosphere, we’ll see what we can to do help you make new friends.
-Ian
Technorati
I’m just going to say it – for someone who says they do *not* care about stats as much as you do, you are seriously the one person I know that talks about stats the *most*.
A few notes:
Technorati does not equal readership, it equals the power of incoming links within a certain time frame – Duane wrote a post about it here.
Also, make sure you have your blog claimed on Technorati and also try using Google sitemaps to make sure it’s indexing correctly. Those tools will help make sure your content is going where it’s supposed to go.
To add to that, there’s a plugin for the sitemap and then use google webmaster tools to make sure things are getting indexed (it will tell you if there are errors). I’m pretty sure Duane wrote a how-to post about that too