Cool WordPress.com feature (tag pages)

Very Cool.

Yeah.

It is also cool that these simple ways of referring are gaining ground, like in flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cars

Some of us use this:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/de+facto

I mean, you don’t have to submit a SOAP message to use those.

My favourite tag would be “cars”. It comes before and after “sex” in development phases of men.

My favourite is probably podsafe music, in part because I’m the featured blog

http://wordpress.com/tag/podsafe-music/

I was sure someone would use the tag xxxxx to be Scobleized.
http://maddogfog.wordpress.com/2006/11/15/testing-the-scoble-tag-effect/

Cool didn’t knew about that.

My favorite would definitely be Tech, followed by CSS

I mentioned the WordPress.com tagging to you before when you were accusing Duncan Riley of gaming Google being part of a blog network.

A blog network however the members have some level of control and relationship to the people they are linkiing to.

The WordPress.com tagging system is the primary benefit of blogging on WordPress.com, because of the massive amount of pagerank it passes on to totally unrelated web pages.

This practice could just be looked on as smart SEO, creating one of the largest blog networks or possibly the largest.

It could also be looked on as creating the biggest link farm of totally unrelated sites.

Using lots of tags with WordPress.com posts is the easiest way to get massive search engine benefit which you didn’t earn.

Why is say ( http://wordpress.com/tag/wifi/) An Unrelated link farm all the posts seem to be relevent to the tag?

I find it very usefull to tag surf on my wordpress.com blog I can quickly scan areas ime interested and comment on them or put them to one side for detailed reading later?

I run a blog featuring heavy metal videos and hence my fav tags are “metal” and “videos”

Andy, the tag system filters out people who abuse it like you describe. It also raises some flags that can cause a blog to be reviewed. The tag pages weren’t created for search engines, they were created to build bridges between bloggers on their own little islands. There are a ton of great blogs you’ve never heard of on WP.com, and by browsing or subscribing to some tags you like, you get a high-quality stream of fresh stuff.

Scoble, if you add /feed to any tag URL you get its *full-content* RSS feed.

You can also subscribe to tags using the tag surfer on your dashboard.

And would like to add (if u have not yet noticed) that same could be restricted to any user too

http://blog_name.wordpress.com/tag/Photoblog

I added a separate navigation widget on my side bar based on this !!!

As I live in Ecuador, my favorite tags are “ecuador” and “tecnologia”.

Hmmm… I wonder why this one is my favorite tag right now…

http://wordpress.com/tag/jobhunt/

Matt: I’m not trying to game WP. I just noticed that after looking at some of my tags. I don’t think anyone else happens to be using that tag.

@ Matt

I know your intentions are good but…

In most things on WordPress.com you use “nofollow” for links which are not meant to count as votes for search engines.

This could easily have been done for the WordPress.com tagging system, just like Technorati also uses nofollow for their tags.

But you decided not to…

As you are technically competent, and aware of search engine issues, then this seems to be a concious decision to “network” all your blogs together, enhancing pagerank.

An individual blogger has no control over who they are passing pagerank to via the tagging system.

Whatever controls you have in place, they are nothing compared to the quality controls About.com have over their blogs, or smaller networks like B5 media.
I would suggest your controls are similar to those Technorati has in place.

There is a heavy relationship between the blog networks I have mentioned, unlike the “accidental” relationship between different blogs hosted on WordPress.com.

Matt, you might not be aware, but very recently Robert was highly critical of the “unfair advantage” bloggers had being in a blog network, compared to him on WordPress.com

Last time I looked, Robert’s 4th most valuable backlink was a tag on Dell.

What classes as abuse?

I use between 5 and 20 tags on most of my normal blog posts, if there are relevant terms. Thus if I mention “mailing list”, I might include “email marketing” as an additional tag.

Where is “tagging abuse” mentioned in the ToS?

Is it looked on as “gaming the serch engines” to tag content sufficiently to find it with a tag search?

There is a massive SEO benefit to having your blog on WordPress.com because of tagging. That isn’t illegal.

If the tagging system isn’t meant to be an SEO benefit, and you want to avoid possible suggestions of being a “link farm”, add nofollow to all tags, just like other tagging services do.

my fav tags:

http://wordpress.com/tag/engtecharticles
http://wordpress.com/tag/engtechblogging
http://wordpress.com/tag/engtechcommentary
http://wordpress.com/tag/engtechlinks

I also have a greasemonkey script to make it easier to deal with lots of tags/categories: http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wpcatr

Andy: saying that I don’t like networks is simplifying my thoughts too much. Obviously I joined a content mall (and am a content mall producer) so I like and acknowledge the Google juicing power of networks.

I just think that everyday people should be able to join a network too without being forced into one due to commercial considerations.

It’s a messy world out there, that’s for sure. Not sure what the right thing to do is in this situation. I can see pros and cons to both sides here.

Hi Robert

I am not trying to be “judgemental”

In my original post (11 days ago now) on WordPress.com Linking Structure I included the following in bold.

Honestly I have done things that are naughtier

I create lots of websites and link them all together in a mininet. I am controlling the quality, though possibly what I class as ok (a site with a percentage of syndicated content, normally 3rd party articles), Matt might not.

Now you might look on the tagging being the same as that being used by Technorati, but there is a fundamental difference.

If someone with a high ranking blog uses the tag “politics” and their worst enemy started a new blog also using the tag “politics”, the person with the existing blog not only is sharing some traffic with the new blog, effectively the same as Technorati, they are also giving them a vote in the search engines, which they might not wish.

Church leaders would be giving search engine votes to atheists

Technorati tagging “builds bridges”, and doesn’t even require a link to Technorati to get the benefit. All you have to do is use rel=”tag”.

Now it seems to me Matt is saying there was no intended SEO benefit.
If that was the case, why do the links to other tagging services on the bottom of the tag page use nofollow? That seems very “SEO aware” to me.

The good thing about tag pages is how well they begin to rank in search results. That has always been one of the advantages of using lots of long-tail tags for Technorati

I believe WP.com show adverts on interlinking pages such as the tagpage, though I don’t get to see them due to region.

I can see pros and cons to both sides here.

I certainly can as well. But then remember Matt and WordPress also championed the introduction of “nofollow” for comments.

The arguement was you shouldn’t be linking to people you don’t want to link to.
That destroyed the easiest way for the little guys to get backlinks by interacting with their peers.

I use a “dofollow” plugin for my comments and trackbacks.

I finished up my original article with

Is this naughty or just smart SEO?

My personal opinion. It becomes naughty when you deny it or try to sidestep the issue.

>>That destroyed the easiest way for the little guys to get backlinks by interacting with their peers.

It also destroyed the currency for spammers who are a major pain in the ass for bloggers to deal with.

Comments shouldn’t be considered search juice. Sorry, you’ll never convince me of that one. If you want search juice, link to me on your blog.

beaches

Comments shouldn’t be considered search juice. Sorry, you’ll never convince me of that one. If you want search juice, link to me on your blog.

Unfortunately linking to you from my blog (which I do), only gives you search juice. Trackbacks by default with WordPress these days also don’t give any reciprocity.

But that is an aside, you are not understanding my arguement fully.

The introduction of nofollow changed the way people comment and trackback. Most forums I frequent have a vast number more comments than the most popular blogs, and do share link juice, possibly to their detriment.

They have a spam problem, but they seem to cope just fine.

By using nofollow, blogs retain more pagerank internally, they receive more search traffic, and become a higher target for spamming.

The lower profile blogs have a harder time receiving traffic and relevance partially due to nofollow, and
so to fix the vicious circle they have helped create, other solutions are implemented to give an SEO and traffic benefit.

Something (nofollow) was introduced to the internet to try to stamp out a monster (comment spam and trackback spam), and unfortunately not only has it been ineffective in its original intentions, it has also become a monster in itself, unbalancing the way links used to be spread around legitimately.
Thus new contrived ways (tag farms) are introduced to try to offset the imbalance caused by the new monster (nofollow).

WordPress that worked well would be much cooler than this.

For the record, my favorite tag is Operation Global Media Domination, for obvious reasons.

It’s interesting and educational to compare the results you get from checking a tag within your blog (ie from your sidebar) and the results you get from checking across WordPress (clicking on the tag in the post).