Technorati Support: FAQ

Support

Q: Getting the "The claim code was not found on your blog" message?

  1. A:

    Try Pinging Technorati

    Sometimes the connnection drops while the spiders indexes your blog to find the claim code to complete your blog claim. Pinging Technorati either manually from our Ping Page or through your blog software

  2. A:

    Double Check that your claim code is correct

    Goto: http://technorati.com/account/claims
    Goto: Complete Claim or Configure Blog

    Compare the Claim Code to make sure it matches up with the code you have in your Blog. This may occur particularly if you've tried deleting a prior claim and reclaiming the blog. The reason this is different is that each time a claim is created for a blog, whether it‚ has been claimed before or not, a new unique code is created.

  3. A:

    If you are using the Post Claim Method ("a href" code) to claim your blog

    Confirm that the Technorati Profile is being displayed as an active hyperlink on your blog home page; some blog editing software (TypePad, WordPress, MSN Spaces, Yahoo!360) will display the code as text unless you specify that it is HTML.

    **Note: The link MUST appear on the blog home page for the Technorati spiders to be able to find the code.

    Best bet: Place the code in at the top of the body in a brand new post or in your blog's sidebar.

    Example: If it looks like this in your post in your Preview, the claim should work:

    Technorati Profile

  4. A:

    Make sure you are claiming the right URL

    The claim process is URL specific. So if your blog resides at a particular URL or redirects to a particular URL, claim the URL where your blog and permalinks reside.

    * Please note that Technorati normalizes all its URLs by taking the base URL for the blog and thus stripping the slash at the end of the URL. So, if you are trying to claim a URL that only resides at an address that is trailing slash specific, you may be unable to.

    * Please also note that our spiders are only able to follow Web Server Redirects such as HTTP Status 301. If you have a JavaScript or HTML redirect set up to your blog URL, our spider will be unable to follow the redirect to find your claim code or index your blog.

    To correct this, and also to better direct users to your site, consider modifying the web server to permanently redirect to the blog URL by sending a permanent redirect response (HTTP Status 301) to anyone requesting the top page. Most servers have re-routing rules built into the server. Apache's mod_rewrite is a popular method of handling such requests. Once you do this, our spiders will be able to visit your actual blog location and thus allow you to complete your claim for your blog.

    This also applies to framesets. The reason behind this is that anyone can submit a claim request for a framed URL regardless of their control of the underlying content.

  5. A:

    Check your Validation

    If the Technorati spiders are unable to pick up your feed and/or your blog information, they will not be able to see the claim code.

    Possible problems our spiders could be running into are validation errors coming across in your blog HTML code. Try checking the validation of your blog HTML using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Correcting errors will help other visitors subscribe your blog as well.

  6. A:

    If you have a redirect in place, please check what kind it is.

    Web spiders don't follow some redirects to find your blog content. Try to handle your redirect in your web server configuration by sending a permanent redirect response (HTTP Status 301) to anyone requesting that top page. Apache's mod_rewrite is a popular method of handling such requests. Search engine spiders and web browsers will follow the redirected link within your site and find your available content.

  7. A:

    iWeb08 Blogs:
    To explain claiming, our spiders look at the source HTML for the claim code provided to you in the claim steps to verify ownership of the blog. However, if the blog uses scripts to display posts and links, the claim link on the webpage but does not appear in the source HTML code and the claim fails. You can check this by performing a "View Source" in your web broswer and search for the claim code.

    If this is the case, try moving the link so that the link code actually appears in your blog HTML.

    A possible workaround would be publish the claim as text. For example:

    1) Where you see
    <a href="http://technorati.com/claim/CLAIMCODE" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>
    where CLAIMCODE is a series of letters and numbers, then instead of using the link, post the text so that it appears with the text for your blog description

    Technorati Profile: CLAIMCODE

    We know this may look ugly, but after we are able to complete the claim, you can remove the text so it is back to normal.