Tip #10 – Take the Technorati “Free Space”

Technorati is a blog search engine that ranks blogs in relation to other blogs on the Internet. While a high Technorati ranking in its self does nothing but bolster a blogger’s ego, it can be used later on as a tool in the monetization process. because Technorati is seen as an independent third party blog ranker, achieving a high rank is every blogger’s secret desire.

Rank in Technorati is determined by how many webpages (and a blog is considered a web page) link back to your blog. So what is the Technorati “Free Space”? Just like in BINGO, there are a few free links that you can get from Technorati itself (unless they plug these loopholes after reading about it here). Technorati counts links from different domains as unique links, and for the purposes of ranking, sub domains are considered unique domains.

To claim your Technorati “Free Space” (and get your blog out of the rankings basement) first visit Technorati and claim your blog by creating an account. Once your blog is claimed, scroll down to the bottom of the Technorati page. You will notice that they have two mirror services – one in Japanese and one for mobile browsers. It turns out that each of these are on their own sub domain, and considered to be unique websites for ranking purposes.

Visit their Japanese mirror and do a search for the name of your blog. Click on your result in the search results and you might notice that the page you are on has a link back to your blog. Copy the URL of that page from your browser and then open a new tab and visit http://technorati.com/ping. Past the URL you copied into the ping box and click ping. Within an hour or so, you should see your Technorati rankings start climbing as they report their own mirror site links to you! Repeat the same process for their mobile site.

I know there are some of you out there with some evil ideas about what other search functions you might also be able to exploit in this way. To save you some work, Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results pages will not work. However, lesser search engines like http://ask.com and http://searchsight.com will work 🙂