Automatically Add Technorati Favorites...and Other Ways to Crack Technorati's Top 100 Popular Blogs

by Paula Neal Mooney

Before you read any further, please fave me and I'll fave you. Clean blogs only!

I've found out so much good stuff about cracking Technorati's Top 100 Blogs list I'm so excited to post this!


For my new blogging readers, Technorati is a site that tracks 77 million blogs and ranks them. The Top 100 Blogs list is ranked by:

1 - The number of inbound links a blog has
2 - The number of people who've made that blog their favorite

As of this writing, the guy in spot #100 (ranked by the #2 method above) only has 170 members who've made his blog a favorite, while the TV Squad blog in spot #100 (ranked by the #1 method above) has 3,126 inbound links, so you can see that the #2 way is the easiest way to get your blog near the Top 100.

Here's what I've learned from my blogging buddies on how to get closer to cracking Technorati's Top 100:

1 - Do a Technorati favorites exchange
Gary V. Vaughan at azazil.net has an excellent post up called Gaming Technorati Favorites that lists a bunch of blogs willing to do a Technorati favoring exchange -- both listed in the post itself and in the plethora of comments. Dosh Dosh also has a similar post up that has gotten a lot of attention.

2 - Automatically make everyone who has favored you a favorite on Technorati!
Favoring back the people who've favorited you was a time-consuming process -- until today, when //engtech came up with this blessed post about a program that he (or she?) wrote about how to automatically favor those who've favorited you!

Worked like a charm...but run it at your own discretion.

3 - Add the feed of your Technorati favorites to your blog, and watch more folks come visit you!
Andy Beard gave me this idea. See our comments conversation here. (Andy's also got a Technorati Favorites - Is This Evil, Lazy or Just Smart? post up that I've yet to dig into.) But I have copied his advice on adding the Technorati feed of my favorite to my blog.

On Blogger you can do this by first finding out your Technorati favorites feed address by looking at the "posts from favorites" on your Technorati page and right-clicking on the orange subscribe button to the right, then choose "copy link location," for example, mine is:

http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/PAULANEALMOONEY?format=rss

4 - Add up to 5 feed items to your blog
Then add the feed to your Blogger blog by going to Layout, choose Template tab, then Add a Page Element, Feed and then put your faves link location you just found in there and choosing continue to enter how many items you'd like to display. There's a max of only five.

5 - Add more than 5 feed items to your blog
If you want more than 5 feed items on your blog, read this post from the wonderful Vin at Dummies Guide to Google Beta Blogger who told me about this great site where you can just enter a feed URL (like the one above) and it'll create the JavaScript programming code for you to plop into your blog. (Put it in Blogger the same way described above, but instead of choosing Feed, choose HTML/Javascript and put it there.)

The great thing about adding your Technorati favorites feed to your site is not only can you keep up with all the stuff your favorites are blogging about -- as well as drive some of your traffic to their sites -- is that folks will see you linking to them on Technorati and come-a-visiting to check you out.

This is what happened the other day when popular blogger Jeff Pulver stopped over at my blog.

And it's the same reason I came-a-calling on over to Andy Beard's blog when he first added his Technorati favorites (including moi) feed to his blog.

Work it! We're gonna shake up that Technorati Top 100's list yet!

Don't forget, claim your blog on Technorati, make sure it accepts favorites by favoriting yourself first, then fave me, I'll fave your clean blogs a lot faster than I would've when I was doing it manually. Thanks!