I just submitted my site to Technorati for inclusion in their blog directory with the hope of gaining some additional link value and visibility.  I wasn’t planning on writing a post about this, but claiming my blog was a bit more confusing than it probably needed to be.  Particularly, the step of implementing Technorati’s claim token – mine is T2CN2GJ5PZUB (you’ll see why that is important later).  Technorati does have a good FAQ on blog claiming, but the last step regarding the claim token was less clear than it needed to be, so here are the steps:

1. Go to Technorati and log-in or sign-up for an account
2. Fill out the required fields of your profile information
3. On your profile, scroll to the bottom of the page to the “My claimed blogs” section and add the URL of your blog
4. On the next page, fill in all of the required details of your blog and proceed to the next step which leads to a “Blog claimed status” page

The next steps are far less clear on what to do next in order to verify your claimed blog.  You will receive an email that says the following:

Thank you for submitting your blog claim on Technorati. Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the site http://yoursite.com by looking for a unique code. We have just assigned the claim token ############ to this claim. Please visit http://technorati.com/account/ for more details, including how to use the claim token.

Sounds good, so you go back to your account page for more details on how to use the claim token – but wait, when you return to your profile there are no additional details on how to use your claim token.  Unfortunately these things happen in web development… no big deal.

So I turned to Google for “how to use technorati claim token” and found their FAQ on blog claiming (though it would have been useful to include it in the email or account section).

So the last steps are to:

1. Write a blog post (such as this) and include your 12-digit technorati claim token in the body of the post, near the beginning (hence my code at the top)
2. Return to your account page, scroll to the bottom, and click the button to “Check Claim”

You should be all set now.  Not the most intriguing post, but hopefully it saves someone a bit of time and confusion down the road.

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