adam is confused about tags, technorati and typepad and i think i contributed to his confusion so let me answer the question…
typepad categories do get recognised as tags in technorati from what everyone says. the reason i have some technorati tags as well is twofold:
a) i didn’t know that when i started adding tags! i also only had about 10 typepad categories at that stage. but as i was going back through blog posts it seemed a good opportunity to create a bunch more categories as i went. so now that i have realised this i don’t add a technorati tag if it is a typepad category.
b) there are plenty of occasions where i want to tag something but it’s not something i want as a category on my blog. to give an example my recent blog post on brokeback mountain went in my typepad film category but i added a technorati tag of brokeback mountain as well. i really don’t want this as a category in its own right but if people search technorati to find what people are writing about brokeback mountain then i’ll be there.
that is the way i’m playing it at the moment anyway… if i’m missing something let me know.
if you still need persuading see 13 reasons to use tags
makes sense. too bad there’s not an easier way to blend “sub categories” or more specific tags on typepad without creating new categories. I’m going through this, too–I’m trying to consolidate my categories in typepad for easy reference for me, but I want my post to be available easily in blog searches, too.
It’s really as simple as this: technorati (or any tag search engine that looks at blog posts could do this) indexes every link that includes rel=”tag” in it — and category tags don’t. Thanks for the link over to my site, glad the info is helpful.
Yah, that’s what I’m figuring out too…thanks for clearing up some of the confusion and letting EVERYONE know that “Adam is confused” 😉
marshall from what you are saying we need both?! but i am now confused. why does this article suggest otherwise? – http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html
sorry – still trying to make sense of it. the last post i did before this i had the categories greenbelt and vj and no tags. if i search under greenbelt and vj tags my post is listed. now greenbelt is a tag for my blog which would explain that. but vj isn’t so the only explanation is that technorati is recognising the category as a tag?…
it’s all martian to me at the moment. when i first claimed my blog on technorati, I appeared on the emerging church tag. however, an hour later that link was gone. i know have both an emerging church category and I have gone back and tagged the most important blogposts on the subject, but nothing. some other of my tags, such as those on film, theology and culture and even golf appear on technorati though. very odd…
Wow, my apologies. You are right, I was wrong. It really isn’t as simple as that! It appears that categories are sufficient, according to Technorati. So long as you are pinging Technorati and using MT, WP or a couple of other software options – it appears your categories will get indexed as tags.
I think you bring up another point here that’s very important – sometimes you want your tags to be more specific than your categories. In fact that’s always the case for me. I’m going to go back and add that to the 13 Reasons to Use Tags post.
Now, it is important to note that pinging can’t be taken for granted. This blog, for example, gets a lot of traffic (I can tell cause I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from it!) but doesn’t use a FeedBurner RSS feed. So presumably you don’t know how many feed subscribers you have. Additionally, Feedburner has a great auto-pinging service that will make sure Technorati and several other key blog search engines get pinged every time you make a post. It is a good idea to make sure that the FeedBurner feed URL that you get from republishing your feed there is included in your site’s metatags next to your native RSS feed URL so the pinging sticks.
I’m really sorry for so snidely offering bad advice! I hope that folks find success in getting their posts indexed by Technorati, even following the best advice won’t always make it work right – but bad advice doesn’t help. Oops! Thanks for following up on it too.
Hello, hello.
I come from Earth. What language do you all speak?