How I Got Banned, Then Unbanned From Technorati

Last Sunday, I got an email from Gustav Mörtberg of Diablo Source pointing me to a post from Earners Blog call Trick to Increase your Technorati Rank. The author explained how he went from 40,000 to about 4,100 Technorati rank in just one day.

I used Xenu to fully spider & grab all the URL’s from sites I knew had a Sitewide link to Earners Blog. I loaded all the URL’s into a text file & got rid of any externals. I then loaded the full list into the pinging tool that comes with Blogger Generator, fire the Technorati ping server into it:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Then just let it run on the entire list.

This technique increased my link count from 888 to 3,100 within the space of around 60 minutes.

Blogger Generator is a get rich quick program that allows you to create a ton of useless Made for AdSense (MFA) blogs on Blogger.com. The $97.00 program also comes with the ping tool you would need to do that above Technorati dance, but there was no way I was going to pay $97.00 for it. However, if you’re evil 😈 , you will be able to figure out how to get the ping tool for free.

With dreams of rocketing to the Technorati top 100 overnight, I grabbed a list of all blogs linking to John Chow dot Com, loaded it into the Pinging tool and blasted it away at Technorati. Now, Technorati doesn’t seem to mind if you send them a few pings (maybe even a few hundred). However, they seem to get upset when you try to send them 17,000. The results: Technorati banned my ass.

Getting Unbanned

At this point I was thinking, “Maybe it’s just a software glitch?” *Classic denial* Doing a Technorati search for johnchow.com resulted in the following message:

Huh?

There are blogs, and then there’s whatever you just typed in. If it’s a blog, we don’t know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it’s a blog that doesn’t exist. Maybe you don’t exist. (In which case, please ignore this.)

At this point, I decided to play dumb and send Technorati an email asking why my site wasn’t ranked anymore. I stressed the fact that I am a longtime Technorati user, promoted Technorati, run the Technorati favorites button, etc., and asked for their help, because I don’t know what happen! 😥 The email worked. Technorati unbanned me and restore my ranking last night (which now stands at 259).

This mass pinging had a side effect on blogs that I linked to. Steve at Ramblings from the Marginalized wrote a post wondering why his Technorati ranking went from 90,000 to 15,955 in a day. Now you know Steve. If anyone else saw a huge Technorati increase, you have me to thank!

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend doing the above. I’m not sure at what point Technorati banned my blog. I noticed it was gone at about the 1100 ping mark. If you do wish to try it, then I recommend you keep the number of pings low and ping just top-level domains and not article URLs.