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Technorati tags point to previous article. Support? Knowledge base?

I’ve emailed Technorati support, but several blogs suggest response is erratic … at the same time Technorati appears to be quite responsive in several blogs reporting their problems … so this is my seriously scientific test to see where I get faster / better response.

All my Technorati tags seem to point to the article that is exactly BELOW the tags, in other words the previously posted one: wrong title, wrong content.

Apparently I am not the only one with this problem, see here and here, to list just a few.

This is what my blog host (Blogharbor) support thinks:

“It looks like Technorati’s crawler can’t tell where one article ends and one begins… Which is strange, as I know that they index both the HTML page and the RSS feed; and your tags would be very clearly contained within the correct item in the RSS feed…

So I can’t see this as anything but Technorati’s problem in that they are allowing their HTML crawler’s interpretation of the document’s tags to have precedence, and the crawler does not properly interpret a category page.

The only thing I can think to combat this would be to use excerpts and make sure you enter your tags in the article area but not in the excerpts, that way your tags do not appear in category view and Technorati (hopefully) picks them up from the Permanent Link URL instead. “

Now, I am already doing what he suggests, namely:

– Technorati tags are in the article and not in the experts
– I am using excerpts, meaning I fill out the excerpt field, and verified through bloglines that it gets in the RSS feed correctly. However, I chose to display the full article, not just an excerpt on my main blog page, and noticed that since I do this, technorati no longer displays my excerpts, only the article title. Not sure if it has anything to do with “getting lost” and picking the wrong article

I must look completely crazy, with all the “irrelevant” post under tags where they don’t belong to.

Well, let the race begin – email or blog? (But why do we need to write individually? Wouldn’t life be easier if Technorati posted a Knowledge Base of known issues/solutions?)

Update: Neither the email to Customer Support nor this Blog entry worked; I got the problem fixed after emailing to David Sifry (CEO) and Kevin Marks of Technorati.

Update (8/10) Mark Evans and “Connected” had a Technorati problem, too. They both use Blogware, and “Connected” ended up developing the same code that is offered to Blogharbor customers as a way to map keywords to Tags.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Comments

  1. Technorati is putting the wrong tags on my posts, sorry!

    It appears that Technorati is somehow confusing the tags of my posts, and in many cases the tags for one post get associated with the previous post.

  2. Anonymous says

    Zoli,

    I’m having trouble with Technorati’s tags as well. I’ve got all these cool ideas in my head but I have trouble implementing them because technorati is a bit flaky on keywords to tags.

  3. Anonymous says

    Update: It is fixed now … keeping fingers crossed that it stays…

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  5. Anonymous says

    I’m still seeing the previous post problem with tags on our site.

  6. Anonymous says

    Guess what: I am seing it again. I’ve given up trying to “fix” Technorati.

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