Friday, May 11, 2007

Are you PING-less in Technorati?

I had problems getting my blog to update at Technorati last Tuesday. When I post to the blog it automatically pings them, but nothing happened. I tried to manually ping it, and even though I got the customary "Thank You" message ... still nada.

Well after a couple of days of this, I check out the support forums and find that there are literally dozens of people with the same problem. Some have been pingless in Technorati for days, weeks, even months. well.

There is a tech guy there named Spidaman(Ian Kallen) who works at Technorati on the back end technical software. He is taking them one at a time, and every pingless problem is somewhat different.

If you are a WordPress blogger, this may interest you, actually probably would apply to most blogging software. If you use the option to publish with Gzip on an Apache 2.2 Server, then it might choke the Technorati crawler, Spidaman said. This problem appeared to happen on a few WP blogs.
The crawler is using python's native gzip library (which I believe is also linked against zlib) and I think it is the culprit, other HTTP client implementations I've tested don't have this problem. I plan on implementing a workaround soon, I suspect this is inhibiting a small but not insignificant number of sites from getting indexed.

Spidaman was helped out immensly by wa7son(Thomas Watson Steen) on the other end. Made for quick debugging. Good job.

A Joomla blog did not have a discoverable feed. Adding a link alternate tag for Real Simple Discovery should fix it.

Two WP blogs fixed themselves and another WP blog needed a support ticket opened, something "glitchy" about crawling it. [Aside] This glitchy blog is anti-Microsoft, complete with the stock warning about using a *compliant* browser right at the top of the page. Funny thing is, the CSS uses extensive hacks for IE5 involving the underscore in front of element names. Pffft[/aside]

Six blogs at Blogspot magically fixed themselves, while another four where "errantly flagged". I am assuming the same issue applied to the both.

Make sure you ping us directly, not through Pingomatic or some other third party. Please understand, our automated systems process millions of blogs everyday. The automated flagging keeps a lot of splogs out of our searches but it also makes mistakes which we regret and try to remedy as fast as we can.


The Url's from a My1Up blog are problematic because of the HTTP redirects. Will be investigated later.

One problem with Feedburner. The feed had not been updated since Friday the 13th. Spidaman suggested that he exorcise the feed daemons (verify that the feed was up to date) or take Feedburner out of the picture and ping again.

Dozens of others were answered with a simple post from unknown Admin figure who simply stated that "We've made the appropriate adjustments so that your blogs should be indexed succesfully from now on." Presumably it is another errant flag that is built into the indexing routines.

As for me, by the time I was ready to put in a support ticket my feed was magically indexed. Isn't that always the case? It is like the days when you were able to smoke in restaurants and when you got tired of waiting 52 minutes for your meal and decide to light one up.

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