Useful as Technorati is for tracking your blog stats, there’s no doubting that it has been very slow recently, and the results flaky at best. I log on to see Blog-Op has 10 blogs linking to it, click for more details only to be told that no URL’s link to it at the moment! Add the fact that those 2 pageloads have probably taken nearly 60 seconds & it becomes a frustrating experience.

Well, I’m not alone in noticing this, as this interesting article on The Register shows. It reports that Google Blogsearch has overtaken Technorati in the number of hits, and has recently shown a 168% increase in traffic. It also points out that Technorati is deluged in spam-blogs (splogs) which further degrade it’s performance.

Whilst I wouldn’t dump Technorati just yet, you must ensure that your blog is being indexed by Google Blogsearch. How? Simply submit it to the Google Blog Search Ping Service and they’ll do the rest. If you can enable automatic pinging from your blog (If you’re on WordPress, you definitely can) make sure you include the Google ping address: See my ping list page.

It’s worth noting that submitting your URL to the blog search is not the same as submitting it to be indexed by ‘normal’ Google services. If you want to do that as well, submit your URL here.