Peter's Blog

Another awTags feature is pinging technorati with tags (or something like that). From my statcounter logs I see I am already getting more traffic from there.

I was looking through my StatCounter logs looking at referrals from google. These give the search terms and it's interesting to see what people are searching for when they find my site. I noticed that someone in Australia was searching for 'StatCounter' itself. I checked with a google search and was surprised to find my post came third on the first page of results, after the StatCounter site at #1 and #2. This is odd, my pagerank is 2 (www.bisiand.me.uk, for some reason bisiand.me.uk is only 1) so why are my ramblings showing up? Does nobody else mention StatCounter?

I started a game, find random blog entry, pick a couple of keywords and do a google search. I found that out of about 5 goes, my blog came up in the first three pages of google results. Even something broad like 'Drupal' puts me on the second page.

So:

• do I only write about obscure topics that nobody else writes about
• does google indeed favour blogs over all those sites full of random search results and price comparisons
• it was a straw pole
• I chose the right keywords
• the googlebot recognises me as an authority on these things
• all the above
• all the first five but mainly the first one and very little of the fifth

I cannot get my post about getting msn desktop search to list exe files to appear on the first few pages of google. exe hits too many program names.

Right now my page loads are all taking a long time because the StatCounter server is not responding. Normally it's Technorati that drags me down.

I was reading this post and was moved to have a play with Technorati. I did a search for my blog and found a couple of other folks have linked to articles in it! This is news to me and has made me happy. I've created a Technorati account and added Technorati to my plugs box on the right. The Quote bubble thing opens up the Technorati search for this site.

The article mentioned how Technorati's performance has suddenly improved and I can vouch for that: it is now almost google-quick.

On a related popularity note, my access logs are showing that the most frequent referrers from google are people looking for the word "MS Draw" (without the space: I don't want the search to find this post) and finding this entry. If you do a google search for that word then my posting comes out top. I seem to be an expert on this particular Word foible.

Added the following to the function ping_ping in ping.module to get blog pinging technorati.

I'll test whether it works by seeing if this posting is pinged.

Update: no errors in the log files, looks ok.