Sunday, 3 April 2005

Technorati tags: invisible tags?






[Edited 29 Aug 2005:] To easily generate invisible tags, see this post (which utilises another way to make tags invisible but hopefully still have them show up on Technorati's tag pages).

To create Technorati tags which are invisible, i.e. can't be seen by readers of your blog post but will still enable the post to be added to the relevant Technorati tag pages, I suspect the easiest way is just to leave out the link text in the tag (for info on what Technorati tags are, why you'd want to use them and how, see this post).

In other words, as an example, I'm tagging this post with the Technorati tag "invisible" by including the following amongst the Technorati tags at the end of the post (though it could go anywhere in the post):

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

But you won't see just plain "invisible" in the tags listed at the end as, of course, that's the point...

If this post shows up on the Technorati tag page http://www.technorati.com/tag/invisible, then I'll know this method works and so anyone who prefers their Technorati tags to be invisible can use it in their own posts.

There are of course other ways to make Technorati tags invisible, like making the tag text the same colour as the background colour, but I think this way would be the easiest, if it works. I'll wait a few hours then check that tag page.

[Edit added:] Yes, it works!


Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

8 comments:

Amit Agarwal said...

Surprised to see that you aren't using any invisible tags in your posts.

Improbulus said...

Thanks for your comment Amit. I see you don't use Technorati tags much yourself, or in the body of your post rather than at the end.

As Kevin Marks said (see the old Haloscan comments) he feels, and I can understand, that invisible tags defeat the original object of tags. I have my tags small, so that they don't take up too much space, but I also think that it's good to allow people easy one-click access to other blogs using the same tags too.

Sure, it will take them away from my blog, but if they like it enough they'll come back. And making things easy and interesting for people is hopefully one way to incentivise them to come back, too.

Anonymous said...

You also need to be careful that Google doesn't penalize your website for having "invisible links." Google might consider these a sign of illegal search engine optimization.

Improbulus said...

That's a good point. I'm not up with all the ins and outs of what Google does or doesn't like, but that makes sense. I don't use invisible links myself, for the reasons I've mentioned.

CL said...

Hi,

Currently I am completely not being tagged. So to use the *invisible* word following /tag/ would completely wipe me from existence.

However, if the purpose is to have the tag invisible, how about modifying the css portion and assign the text color the same as the background color of the page WHILE keeping the original tag script?

Improbulus said...

CL - yes, that's exactly the mechanism behind the post mentioned at the very top of this post - the 29 August addition.

CL said...

I must have missed it improbulus, sowwy! :)

I have to retract -- I am being tagged(some and some not) and as usual it appears few hours. I mean like lots of hours, sometimes days, weeks and I am drowned in the process of searching. I am going to remove my javascript searh my blog box. If I am not properly tagged, then the box is really useless in my opinion and at times it loads forever to get to the page even with my dsl connection.

In any case, I am going to try few other tagging services like delicious, flickr(since I do use lots of graphics). Another one is tag cloud and few others.

Don't get me wrong. In spite of my complaining, I still like technorati :). It's still a cool place to be in my opinion. ;)

Improbulus said...

Hey no probs CL. I'm glad you're getting tagged at least sometimes! As I've blogged about before, Technorati really need to get their act together about the "some and some not". I agree about removing the Technorati searchlet, you'll notice I never installed one on my own blog in the first place as their indexing wasn't reliable enough to me to make it worth while.

And yes tagging on Del.icio.us and Flickr would be fine as those tags should (fingers crossed) also get picked up by Technorati - but who knows??