I have struggled for ages on this one, but finally Technorati has fully acknowledged my three blogs and I am listed!

What did I do? Well, I ignored it for three weeks, forgot about the system and got on with my own business. I just happened to sign on to look to see if by some miracle there had been an update and I was amazed.

So, out of all of the changes that I made to the three blogs that weren’t listed, which do I think helped? Well changing the RSS feed and the permalink structure was a waste of time – I only did that to one blog. Deleting and starting again did nothing – the same screen dump was used! And again, that only affected 1 blog.

The only act that I can explain that was applied across the board, was a Category Excluder pluggin. I am using that to remove from the RSS feed paid posts on the other 3 blogs as they, having decent Page Ranks, were getting a lot of paid posts. Now these paid posts were mainly off topic and, of course, included a link. So maybe there is a threshold that I crossed to the number of irrelevant links out you can have. I don’t think all links out are counted from looking at the blogs that link to me, so maybe it is those posts that are off topic causing a problem.

That is only a guess though. Who knows?

I feel that I am getting unquestionably nowhere with Technorati. I am fading at each turn. Google is coming up with no answers, but masses of further people with the same problems! What do I have to do?

One comment I read on the internet was that Technoratibot does not respect robots.txt. Well, hunting through the How To Start My Blog visitors logs, this is not accurate! It seems that Technorati checks the robots.txt file, then heads the RSS feed and at last takes a look through the feed. Here are the three lines that I see:

GET /robots.txt – 80 – 208.66.67.15 HTTP/1.1 Python-urllib/2.5
HEAD /index.php/feed/ – 80 – 208.66.67.15 HTTP/1.1 Technoratibot/8.1
GET /index.php/feed/ – 80 – 208.66.67.15 HTTP/1.1 Technoratibot/8.1

On HTSMB, there is no robots.txt. But, what is occurring on the other web-sites? Well, one has an empty robots.txt file and another prevents robots hitting certain sites, but not the weblog. The third non listing web site doesn’t have a robots.txt, so probably rulling out any implication that the Technoratibot needs explicit permission to trawl the site, if robots.txt is current. Unless something else is blocking out that website?

So my pursuit to get the rest of the sites listed on Technorati continues. I have lesser blogs to also submit, but I’ll leave them out until I know how to get listed!

I always thought that getting correctly listed in Technorati was as easy as with search engines – sit back and do nothing! I was wrong.

Getting listed in Technorati is the start of improving your Technorati Authority level. The Technorati Authority is basically your ranking within their system. On the whole, it does not really affect much and it is a bit like Google Page Rank – a good ranking is something to show off and wave about, but not really much else.

Except Technorati does provide a degree of traffic and the theory is that with a good enough ranking combined with being listed on their directory, users of the system will stumble onto your site and maybe become your own readers.

Is this the case? Well, I don’t know. But it is an easy enough process to try out and certain benefits should follow getting an improved Authority rank.

To begin with, your Authority is 1 – that’s a step up from non existant site! But as links into your blog are uncovered through other listed blogs your ranking can improve. Quality of posts also affect the rating, in some way. But it is mainly links that matter.

So, how do you start? Well you sign up to Technorati for an account and then they get you to post a random string of digits, such as X665NQUKC8XU to “claim” your blog. That’s it!

One of the most popular paid to blog systems available must be the new version of Pay Per Post (PPP v4), but what does the blogger get from it?

Pay Per Post is a marketplace of bloggers willing to sell posts on their blogs to advertisers. You sign up as a blogger, claim your blog and add a description and set your desired prices.

There are then 2 ways for advertisers to send you work, or opportunities as they are known. The first is to just accept your asking price and send you an opportunity. There is no compulsion to do the work, but you have up to three days to decide to accept it or to turn it down. If the opportunity does expire (and the advertiser can set it up for 1, 2 or 3 days) then you lose the chance of that work and more importantly, your figures for responding to opportunities drop. This is one of the key metrics that advertisers can select blogs on (the reason being people who always ignore opportunity are wasting advertisers’ time), so either accept or reject each opportunity.

The other way to get work is that an advertiser will create a lead and you see the basic details. You see what they are happy to pay per post and can either accept that price, reject the lead totally or accept it but make your own price offer (more or less than they suggested). Personally, from a bloggers’ perspective this is not very successful, but I think it does work for advertisers. I know I accept loads of leads and only a couple ever turn into work.

Pay Per Post expect you to keep the post live (on the same URL) for at least 30 days and after this time your account balance is credited. Once you have $50+ you can withdraw, via PayPal.

Overall, I do like the system, although I have noticed recently that the most work & income comes from PR2 blogs, with even the PR0 blogs getting more work (number of opportunities and total value) then PR3 blogs. Maybe it is just one of those random quirks, or maybe the advertisers currently on the system are limiting themselves to the PR2 price.

There is no minimum blog age, so you will be competing for work against brand new blogs with no followers, which is good if you are just starting out and in that position. As a new blogger, this is the place to start. As an existing one, you should make a decent income, I’m sure the higher PR blogs will attract some advertisers soon!