Every since moving over from Blogger to BlogEngine.Net I have been unable to claim my blog at Technorati. I couldn't find any support or help anywhere so I dropped it for awhile. Finally I got tired of this problem and decided to run it down. I am happy to say that I figured out what is going on to prevent BlogEngine.Net users from claiming their blog. Read on...
If you look at the RSD.AXD results (ex. http://www.dscoduc.com/rsd.axd) you will notice the following info included in the results:
<link>http://www.dscoduc.com/</link>
But when you read the RFC for Really Simple Discovery you can see that the entry should look like the following:
<homePageLink>http://www.dscoduc.com/ </homePageLink>
Notice the difference? The <link> tag is replaced with the <homePageLink> tag. Why is this important? Well if Technorati finds that your blog supports RSD.AXD then it will attempt to use the <homePageLink> tag to get the necessary information about your blog, as outlined in this article. Apparently Technorati doesn't like the <link> instead of the <homePageLink>...
In order to confirm this issue I went into my web.config file and commented out the following line:
<!--add verb="*" path="rsd.axd" type="BlogEngine.Core.Web.HttpHandlers.RsdHandler, BlogEngine.Core" validate="false"/-->
After I did this I attempted to claim my blog... Finally Technorati gave me a claim link that I could add to a blog entry! Yeah. Except there was another problem... After adding the claim link I "Released the Spiders" as per the instructions on the Technorati. With my spirits high I was disappointed to find the claim process didn't complete... The error message was that Technorati couldn't locate the URL it was expecting to find.
Then it hit me... I have configured my blog to only show a description of each entry. The description view only shows a line or two of the blog entry, and doesn't show any links... So Technorati wasn't finding the URL because the description view doesn't show it. Easy fix... I just went into the settings and unchecked the option to only show the description.
Finally everything works and I have successfully claimed my blog on Technorati. Give these steps a try and see if they work for you too!
