Mashable, in celebration of their fifth birthday, have published a Look back at the last 5 Years in Blogging. the post begins with a reference to one of the original pillars of blogging: Technorati. back in the day, every blogger who was anyone made sure their blog was in the Technorati blog search engine and directory.

When we started up our Envato blogs I had an account where I would submit them, and we kept a close eye on how our authority was tracking to see if we would break into the super exclusive club that was the Technorati Top 100. These days the site has really dropped off my radar, so today I set out to see if it still has any relevance?

The Top 100

For me Technorati was always about their top 100 list of the who’s who of blogging. the closest we ever came was when FreelanceSwitch peaked at #200 on their list of blogs, and then began sliding down again when we let up our ferocious link and social media campaigns.

Checking back on the Top 100 today, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Technorati now break up the main top 100 list into sublists like the Top 100 Gadget blogs and Top 100 Business blogs.

That sounded pretty cool, and I thought wow, maybe some of our blogs will be in the top 100 for their niches. After all sites like AppStorm and Tuts+ are pretty well known…It turns out though that Technorati only index blogs that someone has submitted to their directory. a search for “appstorm” yields no results.

Frankly this seems a bit weird to me. Aren’t we in the era of post indexing? Shouldn’t that extend out to blog indexing? how does Google Blog Search determine which sites are blogs so it can search them? There must be a way, right?

Submitting a Claim

So I decided to run a claim for AppStorm in their system to try to register our blogs. We already have an account, so I figured this shouldn’t be too hard. Here’s what happens next:

  • First you fill out a bunch of information – that’s fair enough
  • Next you get a message saying: “We are evaluating your claim. Evaluation may take some time.”
  • So you would think from that message that they will be able to register the claim soon. Nope! It turns out that if you wait a few minutes, they then ask you to publish a post with a claim code that looks like this: 7D3FKZ5A23S5.
  • Publishing a post is going to be pretty annoying/confusing for our readers because they’ll be wondering what Technorati even is, and why their regular schedule is getting interrupted. So I publish a post and backdate it to 2008 so it doesn’t appear in the feed.
  • Unfortunately it turns out that Technorati insist that you publish a NEW post so they can look through your RSS instead of being given a specific URL to check.

End result: I couldn’t claim any of our blogs without a massive amount of trouble and an annoyance for our readers.

If I can’t submit a claim …

So this begs the question, if I can’t get our network of fifteen pretty darn large blogs into Technorati, are they actually an effective place to search for blogs? Who else is missing? Some of our sites have up to 100,000 RSS readers, so you would think that any decent collection of the world’s blogs would include them.

Does Technorati have anything else going for them?

Technorati have been trying to innovate in a range of new areas, including their Annual State of the Blogosphere Report, the Twittorati site for profiling Twitterers (no AppStorm there either), their People list, a PR/Blogging app and the Technorati Media platform.

But for me personally, I don’t understand how a site that claims to be the fourth largest social media property in the world can do such a poor job of their core purpose.

What do you think?

Do you think Technorati is still relevant in 2010? Or are they just a relic of the early blogging era?

Image Attribution: the awesome Technorati icon at the top of this page is courtesy of Michelle Kirkbride and IconFinder

Is Technorati still relevant to bloggers?

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