What is the relationship between Technorati tags and Google search results?
Bill Ives of the Portals and KM blog did an interesting bit of analysis about how tagging with Technorati may or may not affect rankings in Google.
It’s something I’ve been paying attention to as well. Recently I found this really nice WordPress plug in that makes it dead easy to tag content in Technorati. It’s called ‘SimpleTags‘ and it allows me to simply mark up the text I am writing inline and certain words will automagically become Technorati tags.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Technorati Tags: Portals and KM, SimpleTags
September 3rd, 2007 at 8:13 am
I don’t get the sense of Bills article. Google is doing a full text index and Technorati tag search is a search for the microformat rel=tag. Googles index has absolutely nothing to do with tagging.
Said that I want to add that using the microformat rel=tag gives a nice additional Google ‘link love’ to those hrefs (read: landing pages!) which of course have also to be relevant to the subject in terms of the Google way of indexing pages. This is true for internal and external landing pages. Linking to Technorati itself only gives ‘link love’ to the Technorati landing pages but NOT to your original page … not more then any other qualified external href.
The conclusion is that you alway should use internal tag links if possible. The additional internal tag search result pages are a nice supplemental way of making your site appear bigger and more relevant to Google for the keywords (read: tags).
Simple examples:
One new article with five new internal tags will result in publishing six new pages all linking to each other (and to more tag pages) if tags are published everywhere. Trap: Make sure that the tag search result pages only show excerpts to avoid duplicate content.
The same if using ‘old’ tags: The new article with five ‘old’ tags will immediately get five internal links and the five old tag search result pages will be enriched by the new excerpt on top.
Bonus: Publish the tags in your feed and Google will notice the ‘news’ about the new or refreshed pages immediately. Just ping one of the nice pinging services and you are done.
Technorati is not affecting Google rankings very well!
Test case: Check Google SERPs for your keywords (referrers coming from Google) and find out the listing of Technorati result pages on those SERPs.
In other words: Google is a search engine and Technorati is a search engine (or a dynamic directory). What sense would it make for Google to index another search engines dynamic result pages? That kind of looping is stupid by construction (avoid resonance).
As always just my two cents…