Technorati Tags: What Are They Really?

Based on the Technorati Help page, if I provide the rel="tag" attribute to the category listing for each article, I should get indexed just fine.

Note the text, about half way down the page: “You do not have to link to Technorati.”. I can link to my own category pages, without giving any SEO benefit to Technorati, and still be indexed.

This doesn’t sound so bad to me.

I had a bit of an AHA moment the other day with Technorati when I realized that the benefit was to allow people to organize themselves with their content alone, no additional structure required. It’s the same way people use Flickr tags to create “groups”. The reason I’d prefer to use a Technorati Tag (which I never have, I might add), is that I’d rather not muddy up my own category system with what is, presumably, a one time thing. It’s the difference between have a hierarchical category system versus an open tagging system, I guess. Just my two cents.

It sounds good to me, too, Jeff. What I wonder is if any other blog search engines are supporting this way of doing things….my assumption is that other blog search engines wouldn’t index technorati-specific tags.

If my assumption is correct, then the method you mention is certainly better than any engine-specific method.

Jeff, when Technorati launched their tags they initially required a link back to Technorati. They removed the requirement quickly, but left the example still showing the link. Not too long after they removed Technorati in the example. This was after the alpha folks had been through and followed what was initially there.

One of the things Technorati did when it began their tag scrapping was to include categories in the commercial blog tools (WordPress and Six Apart tools). I am not sure if this is still done or not.

With Technorati Tags the best value I find is their great interface on their Technorati Tags page. It aggregates social bookmarking tagging results from del.icio.us and furl as well as the photo sites that tag, like Flickr. The scraped tags are displayed in the center of it all. But, the Technorati Tags are what I find least valuable (I find them incredibly less valuable than their own keyword filters).

The down side of Technorati Tags runs across a few lines. But first I will pull together the optimal folksonomy tagging environment (which Technorati does not claim to be), which has three required data points: a distinct object being tagged, a distinct person tagging, and the distinct tags. With these three elements tags filtering can be performed to bring greater value from the corpus. On top of these three elements it is important for the consumer of the content to be performing the tagging, in their own self interest while sharing it with the community. This last component is where Technorati falls from a folksonomy tool, like del.icio.us, into regular tagging.

What is being tagged and by whom is difficult to discern in the open wilds that Technorati scrapes/indexes. In many blogs posts the person tagging is the content creator. But, it really gets confounded when it is unclear whether the tag applies to one or more of the links in their post, the tag is stating what their post is about, or is providing a tag as a summary of the post’s content.

Where I find the Technorati Tags lacking is when I click on a link and the only place the term is being used in the post is in the tag. I too often I can not find a reason for the tag as it relates to their post. When people are selecting tags for their content based on what they think others may call it, we get into a very slippery slope that quickly lands at the doorstep of Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap. This makes it tough to discern language and definitions for the tag terms. Understanding what is being tagged and the vocabulary of the person tagging I may filter in or out that person in my list of people to follow or ignore on specific tag terms.

This is not the fault of Technorati, but it is an unclear practice and implementation on the part of many tagging. In these cases a marriage of the tags and the terms in the text of the posts could provide improved results. Some believe this algorithmic approach is the best way to go, while others believe this is best done by humans. It is important to keep in mind people are loving this tagging stuff at the moment and finding a way to harvest that energy would be helpful. The selfish tagging in del.icio.us and to a large degree in Flickr is what really caught my eye and that of others at the time folksonomy was coined. The richness and value to the individuals was easy to perceive, which was quite different than all tagging efforts that had come before them.

I am finding solid results lately from the nascent Yahoo MyWeb 2 Search, which is quite similar to del.icio.us in many aspects, but the results are layered on top of the regular Yahoo search results from those in your community.

I was getting some good traffic from technorati for about 3 months, then they just stopped listing my site as updating. From their interface it appears that I haven’t posted to my blog in many months. This is despite both tagging and pinging. Now that they have done this on two of my four blogs, I can only conclude that their service is worse than worthless to me. Of course, emails to their support team are merely ignored.

Technorati is absolutely useless to me in terms of getting traffic. I see zero benefit from using their tags and am no longer using them.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Winston Churchill

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