Are Technorati Tags Worth the Trouble?
As of November 2006, Technorati claims to be tracking 60 million blogs. OK, so what? Anyone who has had problems getting indexed by Technorati will ask themselves, ‘Are these tags worth the trouble’?
Technorati online help is mediocre at best and support is nearly non-existent. Assuming you have claimed your blog, there are two more hurdles to get over. First, is getting excerpts of your recent posts to show up on your Blog Info page. Second, is getting post specific tags indexed to show up in the Technorati tag search results.
The first step should be as easy as pinging Technorati via your blog pinging service. Lately however, I have found that using Ping-o-matic dos not seem to work. I have to go to the Technorati ‘Your Blogs’ page and ping my blogs manually.
Assuming you get the first step to work, Technorati will index your post using it’s assigned category(s) as a tag(s) because WordPress automatically adds the rel=”tag” code to the category link(s). More problematic is getting post specific tags to show up in Technorati. There is plenty of bad advice floating around the net. Most of the tips just don’t work. Here is the secret: your post specific tags must show up in your feed or Technorati will not see them. If you tag your posts with the Simple Tags plugin like I do, you will need to go to the WordPress Reading Options and set the Syndication Feeds to show full text for each article.
Full text in the feed in not my preference. It discourages feed readers from visiting your site and encourages splogging. Do we have a choice? Not until someone comes out with a plugin to put the tags in the post excerpt.
The standard Technorati format is like this:
However, this format is also valid:
The rel=”tag” simply designates the word inside of the link as the tagged word. The link can be an external or internal link.
The reality is that I see very little traffic coming to the blogs that I edit from Technorati. Still given the present and future importance of the Technorati tag, a webmaster cannot ignore this important tool.
As Wayne Hurlbert points out in an article on Blogger Talk: Technorati tags provide search engine benefit as well. Since the important keywords for the blog post are spelled out in the Technorati tag, and are part of a link, they have real SEO value. [tag]Google[/tag] gives strong consideration to Technorati tags, whether post-generated automatically from code or from pre-existing categories, or from manual coding for individual posts.
Start tagging!
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