Technorati Tags A No Go
A lot of webmasters, especially bloggers, use Technorati Tags as a means of site promotion. I have been testing them on several site for a few months now and have found that they are worthless. While the tags might have some use from a usability standpoint, that is only the case if Technorati actually serves your pages on their site when one of YOUR visitors clicks on the tag. They have had many technical issues including inbound link tracking and now they are having issues serving up relevant results from tag clicks.
I ran seven tests on seven sites last month and more than half the time Technorati failed to show results from any of the sites. In fact they show an error message that states there are no pages from the blog about “search engine optimization”. It would almost be funny if you didn’t take into consideration the time wasted with Technorati widgets and plugins.
From an SEO standpoint I have seen 0 inbound links credited from Technorati in either Google or Yahoo. This is from seven sites that each have over a thousand inbound links from other sources. There were no other tangible benefits from Technorati tags from SEO or traffic. As far as the authority, the highest number I was able to achieve was 75 on a site that is in the top 125,000 in Alexa and has a 7 PR. The site gets over 1500 unique visitors a day and not 1 came from Technorati last month.
I have removed the simple tags plugin as well as the tags code from all the sites. The next test will be using the full features of WordPress tagging. I will keep you all informed on how that goes.
For now the conclusion is Technorati is a no go from all 3 standpoints:
- SEO – no benefits in search engine placement from Technorati Tags
- Usability – there is no benefit from having visitors leave your site and go to Technorati.
- Linking – I have seen no inbound link credit from Technorati in either Google or Yahoo.
My recommendation is to loose the Technorati widgets and not waste any time with specific plugins for their tags. I will still ping their system when my blogs are updated, but will no longer go out of my way to incorporate their stuff into my sites.
