Om talk’s about the dark side of Technorati tags:
I liked the idea of tags, essentially dynamic categories crossed with keywords. Except it bothered me that all the tags I embedded in my post were linking back to Technorati site. Given that very little traffic flows my way from them, I loathe the idea of sending traffic their way. Still, I thought, greater community good and all that jazz. I started poking around. But something did not sit right, and here is why.
Of course he’s right. Hundreds of bloggers are using Technorati linked tags. These are the type of tags that include the Technorati URL within the tag.
This has the added benefit of boosting their PageRank. I’m willing to accept that this was a secondary benefit. I think the Technorati gang is honest but the added revenue will just end up corrupting. Power corrupts…
Now Google could of course step in and dampen their PageRank and to be perfectly honest I think they’ve already done it.
The issue is that URLs should not be within tags. It’s a hack. We need another microformat here.
Of course I should point out that Technorati will index any URL you want as long as rel=tag but to be honest 99% of people are using the main Technorati website.
A workaround of course is to use RSS categories. Typepad supports them so all I have to do is get my pings to Technorati and they’ll index them. Hopefully the support Atom categories as well.
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August 2, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Using links for tags is not a hack, it is a deliberate design. It both makes them explicitly visible, and allows disambiguation of the tag’s meaning by letting you point to either an inclusive tagspace like Technorati’s or Flickr’s, a definitional one like Wikipedia, or a personal one.
If you link to Technorati, we link back, which seems fair.
You can of course put rel=”tag nofollow” if you want to make Google not count your links.
If you want to talk further, you know where to find me.
August 2, 2005 at 5:44 pm
I hear you Kevin. But we’re not talking techical here we’re talking about real world implementation.
There are shipping applications that are configured for Technorati. Even though you don’t require that you guys are the target URL these applications are still configured for Technorati.
People *can* put in nofollow but realisticallty the won’t.
The truth is that if it were Microsoft doing this we’d all be upset.
Kevin