Claim Your Blog on Technorati For More Potential Traffic

Did you know that you can claim your blog on Technorati? Do you know why you should?

I’m claiming mine with this post by including this claim token: 7T2NVQP7MN7Y. I have four blogs registered on Technorati from back in the day, all four of which are pretty much moribund. Back then, it wasn’t necessary to bother with claim codes and such. You pretty much signed up, added your blog(s) and put a little Technorati icon on your site to show that you were linked up.

A Timely Reminder

Frankly, I’d forgotten about Technorati until I was reminded the other day. Thanks, Jeannette! In fact, I’m shamelessly stealing her idea to use a post about claiming a blog on Technorati to claim my blog. As a payback, however, I’m going to urge you to subscribe to her blog to find out how to claim your blog on Technorati. She’ll be posting about that very subject shortly.

Why Claim Your Blog?

Years ago, before the advent of what we know as social media today, the first thing one did when starting a new blog was to register it on Technorati so that posts would be fed to Technorati’s site via RSS feed. This had the potential to generate large amounts of traffic if one of your posts became popular and was featured on the front page of Technorati. In fact, many bloggers had this happen and ended up with crashed servers due to the huge influx of traffic that this phenomenon caused.

Too Much Traffic?

“You mean there’s such a thing as too much traffic?” I hear you asking.

The answer is “yes” in cases like that. Most of us are using shared hosting and have a fairly predictable amount of traffic to our sites on any given day. While the host can probably handle a fairly significant increase in traffic over a short period of time, it’s not going to be able to deal with it when visits go through the roof in a matter of hours. Rather than allow your horde of visitors to crash the server, the host will restrict access to your site until the deluge subsides.

It’s All Good

So, is having a post hit the front page of Technorati a good thing, or not? Well, one of the things Technorati does besides generate traffic is to compile an authority ranking for all blogs registered there. The more popular your posts, the higher your authority ranking. The Technorati authority ranking still means something so having it as high as possible is definitely a good thing.

Should I Get A Bigger Server?

Not necessarily. If you’re going to make a habit of hitting Technorati’s front page, then you should look into increasing your server capacity. For most of us, however, being featured on Technorati is a fairly rare event. If you’re going to have server traffic issues once every few months (or years, let’s be honest), you don’t need to spend the extra money on extra server bandwidth.

It’s similar to a situation I recall about 20 years ago when Philadelphia was hit with major snowstorms every Monday for several weeks in a row. People began to complain that the snow wasn’t being removed quickly enough and wondered why there wasn’t enough equipment to handle it. Frank Rizzo, the mayor of Philadelphia at the time, said, “Do you really want to pay a lot more in taxes to buy and maintain equipment that will be fully utilized maybe once in 20 years?”

The same logic applies to your hosting account. If you’re that good that you’re generating huge quantities of traffic, then you definitely need more server horsepower. If, on the other hand, you get lucky once in a great while, save your money, but keep cranking out those blog posts. You never know…

John Sawyer