Buggy Technorati is practically useless

Under normal circumstances my modus operandi would be to encourage everyone to claim their blog on technorati in order to help increase reach and the chances that blog posts go viral. However, I guess it's also important to have cautionary tales like the one I am about to relate.

When claiming a blog on technorati, you:

1. create an account (I won't link to it here, because I'm no longer recommending it)
2. add your blog URL in the form provided
3. add the claim token they supply you with, like this one "ZSBU8N29W5TE"
4. wait for verification

The first time round I did this, and things went fairly smoothly. After a few month, however, I noted that technorati stopped updating itself with new posts from my blog. As time goes by your technorati authority (important for determining the level of exposure blog posts receive on that site) drops. My blog handn't changed, new posts were going up regularly but technorati wasn't listening.

I tried support and had no joy. Eventually, I deleted that blog claim and retried it. This is where the fun began. When I claimed my new blog, the old, broken one still reappeared (as shown in the image in this blog). I initially tried to delete this "old claim" that still housed the old blog information, but when clicking on its red delete button, technorati then tried to delete the "new claim". So I was stuck. I had to keep this phantom old claim.

Never mind, so long as the new claim worked I didn't really care. The problem was that it didn't. Technorati could not find the new claim token. I must have tried twenty times. Checking my blog URL (which I copied and pasted directly from the feed page), ensuring the claim code was correctly pasted into the latest post, right at the top. The claim token showed up in my feed, but technorati was no wiser.

Worried that my blog was somehow unavailable to the rest of the world, except for me, I check that other services could access it. They could, no problem. So the problem was definitely with technorati. I went to their support. This was an even bigger mistake. You can't get support without creating an account on a very poorly rated third party system. My support request is still outstanding from a week ago - it was very politely written... just ignored.

At any rate, I think it's a disgrace and I would have been far better served writing new content for my blog and driving traffic than fiddling around with broken services with no support. Fingers crossed something will change soon.