Better Tech Examples: Unable to Claim Your Blogger Blog on Technorati?

If you have a blog on the Blogger service and have been trying unsuccessfully to claim it on Technorati, one of the biggest blog registries around, then continuing reading this article because it contains some steps that you can try to fix the problem.

I was trying to claim this blog and a few others, all of which are powered by Blogger, on Technorati and kept getting a 500 error message -- invalid URL. I tried retyping my URL and used several different formats:

http://www.bettertechexamples.com
www.bettertechexamples.com
bettertechexamples.com

But nothing worked! I was confounded and I did what most other people would do when stumped -- I began to Google. I found lots of complaint threads, some on Technorati itself. A few offered fixes but they did not work. Then I stumbled on one blog and they said that the code Technorati tells you to temporarily post to verify ownership of your blog should be embedded in HTML code as a link. It also said that the post with the link should be the most recent post on the blog, rather than dating it to be the oldest post on the blog.

So I did that and in the "Edit Html" function of the Blogger editor, I entered:

Now you might notice that in the part of the markup that represents the visible-in-the-browser link, I repeated the entire URL rather than using a friendlier "Better Tech Examples" blurb -- that's because I followed the example on the blog I stumbled upon.

Even after doing this, however, I received the invalid URL error in Technorati. So then I began to experiment with how I entered the URL. I had noticed that when I entered the URL as "http://www.bettertechexamples.com" or as "www.bettertechexamples.com" the "www." part would always drop off. At first I did not care since in Blogger, under the Settings tab's publishing sub-tab I had set "bettertechexamples.com" to redirect to "www.bettertechexamples.com" so I assumed this would work. Because nothing was working, though, I decided to trick the Technorati form and I entered "http://www.www.bettertechexamples.com" and sure enough this meant that the URL Technorati displayed and looked for was "http://www.bettertechexamples.com" (after the first "www." was removed). VOILA -- NO URL ERROR CODE! Instead, Technorati found my blog's URL, finally, and said congratulations, I could register via OpenID or a post; I opted for the post method since I already had published a post with the text code that Technorati would seach for.

So to sum up, if you can't claim your Blogger blog in Technorati try these steps:

Take the code Technorati generates to post into your blog and embed it in a link by following the example provided above.
Make sure you publish that code as the most recent post in your blog.
Prepend the additional "www." to your URL, so when you enter it, it looks like "http://www.www.myURL.com"

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