Technorati has added a related tag feature. This will suggest related tags tags which could be related. Pictured above is an example of the technology tag which seems to do a pretty decent job. Contextual algorithms can be tricky.

Something I don’t like about these Technorati tags are that there doesn’t seem to be any archives. This means that once the tags roll off the front master tag page (and for active tags, this can happen quickly), there are links to Technorati from your blog but no link from Technorati back. This means the tags become one-way.

As a general practice, we will remove one-way trackbacks made to this blog. One-way being defined as sending a trackback to this blog but not having a link inside the actual post. IMO, this is sort of analogous to someone having a party and the neighbor with a party across the street coming over putting fliers on the door about their party but not doing the same at their party; it seems very one-sided to me, even if the neighbor’s party is bigger and better. Still, there are a few rare exceptions when we do accept one-way trackbacks, so it’s not a completely black or white issue. I guess I’m saying it’s a netiquette issue of sorts to me.

So these one-way tags could provide a benefit to readers when and where they are able to navigate to additional, fresh related content, but it also significantly increases the linkage to Technorati and gives an ugly appearance of spam inside the blog entries themselves, especially when a lot of tags are used on blog entries that don’t contain many words.

I am concerned about how the major search engines will see these tags and I don’t want to do anything that penalizes our sites in the search engines. I wonder if Dave Sifry and Technorati or the Del.icio.us folks have ever contacted the big three SEs (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and asked what their position was on these tags and tagging in general?

And yes, I do realize that Yahoo recently bought Flickr and that Flickr is a major proponent of tagging. However tagging pictures so that they are more descriptive is helpful on a number of levels - especially for accessibility reasons. I’m not entirely cerrtain that blog post tagging carries quite the same benefits for the end user as picture tagging.

Then again, I don’t know. I’m just musing here and would like some reader feedback on this one.

Readers will see that I have been sporadically experimenting with these tags, and also — finally — del.icio.us (grrr to the spelling of that domain). I still like Furl better, but I’m no longer a holdout on using this service.

Not sure how I’ll deal with tagging over the long haul, but I’m very curious how other webmasters feel about the use of these tags and potential pros and cons? This is something I hope we can discuss tomorrow night at the Skype meetup.

tags: tags, technorati

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