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TRACKING YOUR BLOG IN TECHNORATI |
The most disappointing result of this search is no results. That means that no other blog has cited your blog entry — at least, no other blog searched by BlogPulse during the time since you posted the entry. Although most blog search engines claim lightning-quick search cycles, it doesn’t always seem that way. Allow a full day since your post before assuming the engine has crawled the blogosphere. Remember, too, that although bloggers move fast to stay current, many citations are two, three, or more days behind the post they are citing. So if your search results are unsatisfying, try again tomorrow. Next up are a few of the most-used blog search engines. Quality of results varies hugely from engine to engine and from search to search.
For a long time, Technorati ruled the blog-search business; it still enjoys loyalty, but many bloggers have become frustrated by chaotic search results and have moved on. Most blog search engines are portals of blog information that offer more than just pure search. Poke around BlogPulse for some interesting and innovative presentations of blogosphere activity. And when you are purely searching, remember that you can enter plain keywords into the search box; you don’t have to enter a URL. Following are four major blog engines:Technorati (www.technorati.com): The godfather of blog searching, Technorati indexes a database of about 16 million blogs, as of this writing. Older entries are harder to find than newer ones; if an entry no longer resides on the blog’s index page (because newer entries have pushed it off), that entry’s status is reduced in Technorati’s index ranking. With the tagline, “Who’s linking to whom,” Feedster is perfect for blogosphere addicts. Fast, with extremely useful results, Feedster enjoys a loyal following. Click Links for a dedicated URL-citation lookup. BlogPulse (www.blogpulse.com): BlogPulse is spectacularly imaginative when measuring the blog universe and is worth visiting even if youare not searching. When you are searching, keep in mind that the index contains nothing older than six months.
Bloglines is One of the foremost Web-based RSS newsreaders (see Chapter 13), Bloglines also functions as a major searching destination. Owning perhaps the deepest archive of any blog engine, Bloglines never throws anything out. However, it crawls only blogs whose RSS feeds are subscribed to by at least one Bloglines user. That means that if a quality blog, read devotedly by many people, does not happen to have an RSS subscriber using the Bloglines newsreader, that blog is not crawled or indexed by the Bloglines search engine.
Promoting Your Content Participating in the blogosphere’s macrologue, by writing comments and planting TrackBacks, is the most organic way to promote your blog. These techniques do not promote gratuitously or purely for selfish gain. Instead, promotion is garnered by virtue of worthy discourse. If you have things of value to say, people start visiting and subscribing to your feeds. Continued participation in the blogosphere discussion is important to maintaining a high profile.