Have you recently done a search on Google for a word, especially one that is often mentioned in the blogosphere (such as skype, ajax, podcast)? One of the first results is often a link on Technorati.

Tagging is hot these days. Sites like Flickr or del.icio.us showed us the power of tagging and when Technorati introduced the concept for blogs, many - including me - found it was a nice way to improve the conversation.

But the way the tags are implemented could be considered as link spamming. A tag is an URL to Technorati:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/tags" rel="tag">tags</a>


So involuntarily thousands of bloggers are giving a huge PageRank to Technorati! But contrary to for example Wikipedia, Technorati doesn’t provide the actual valuable content only links to it (like Google itself).

The power of the blogosphere to give a high PageRank to a site is known. If the popularity of this way of tagging keeps growing, most of the one word searches on Google will soon return a Technorati page first.

Of course Google won’t let that happen. They cannot just exclude or penalize Technorati, after all they are not spammers, forcing nobody to put a link to them on their blog. So they will just end up buying them! It will be a nice way to actually even increase the relevancy of searches, and it will solve the link spamming problem, since Technorati results will be shown separately, not with the other search results.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 17th, 2005 at 10:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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