Technorati Tags - Useless, or Just a Waste of Time?

Technorati Tags - Useless, or Just a Waste of Time?

It pains me to write this post. Some time ago, I spent a number of hours writing a program to easily, rapidly, simply, and conveniently generate Technorati tags for this and other of my blogs, and to offer it for sale to my readers and others.

But, I have come to the conclusion that bothering to include Technorati tags, contrary to what I previously was led to believe, is worthless, useless, and simply a waste of time.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail, or spend any time polishing this post. It is not worth it to me. It is just a warning to you. If you are not getting the results you may have been led to expect by including Technorati tags in your posts, IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. It is that Technorati sucks.

Including Technorati tags gives THEM backlinks, but frequently doesn't give YOU backlinks. All too often, even though you ping them, your posts will not show up if you search a tag you have made, even searching it from your own blog.

Even if somehow, your posts do make it into their database, it will not show when someone does a default search. Your post will essentially disappear because of others' blog posts with the same tag word. Then, there is the question of your blog's "authority". That is an attempt by Technorati to be the "Google of blogging." Their algorithm sucks. It is similar to Google's in that it is based on high school clique popularity contests. (see Google Search Engine Rankings - Just a High School Popularity Contest.)

Then there is that rigamorole of "claiming" your blog. That is totally cumbersome, to both add and delete blogs. And it begs the question of why do you need Technorati permission for YOUR blogs. Just more useless, time-consuming "Web 2.0" craaap.

Furthermore, Technorati is totally unresponsive to queries regarding problems, and I suspect that if you question them with challenging questions, they just blacklist you, and they use your blog "claim" information for that. Beware!

I could go on, but I have spent too much time on this already. Just ask yourself, if you use Technorati tags, have they REALLY done you any good? Comments are open.

Update 2009-06-18: See Technorati Tags for SERP -- Useless?

RaSof - My Last Word About It...

RaSof - My Last Word About It...

Unless I see some reason to make me change my mind, why bother writing more? For me RaSof (Ranking Software) didn't work. Scoring others' pages with RaSof gives scores having no relation to SERP (search engine results page) location/ranking.

As I said about a year ago on my site at $1000 a month for Brausch's Ranking Factors (RaSof)?.

My conclusion from those results is that if you have no links, even an EXCELLENT RaSof score will do you no good. OTH, if you do have links, a good RaSof score is NOT necessary.

Look for my RaSof commentary and details on my e-Commerce Internet Business website.

My previous blog posts regarding RaSof are archived at:
http://e-commerce-biz.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
http://e-commerce-biz.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html
http://e-commerce-biz.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

Now, Fred Black weighs in with his excellent and detailed post "Search Engine Optimization - A Reader Asks My Opinion of Rasof" on his site at http://www.pqinternet.com/126.htm

Aside from his discussion of RaSof, it looks like Fred is working on a program or system to actually DO what RaSof promised. Since Fred has been consistently at or near position #1 in Google for the highly competitive keyword (keyphrase) he has targeted -- internet business -- I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

Another Google Slap -- Page Rank Hits

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the latest "Google Slap" -- the downgrading of "Page Rank" (PageRank) for thousands of sites.

I don't pretend to know what it is all about; it's all too complicated for me, but for more information, see the link below to John Furst's site.

My take on all this is that I want to thank Google for helping me to reinforce my decision to de-emphasize this web biz cr**p in favor of re-emphasing my stock market endeavors.

I thought stock trading was hard, but I have made orders of magnitude more money in stocks than in this e-biz.

I got into e-biz as I thought it would be both interesting and good $ for part-time endeavor. (I only wanted to do it part-time.) It has instead turned into a time-consuming monster with a negligible "hourly $ rate" return.

And, I thought playing stocks was complicated. This is vastly moreso.

Thanks again, Google, for your manipulation and lack of transparency. Thanks for smashing my AdSense revenue about a year ago. Thanks for screwing with me (and others) again, now that my AdSense and other revenue has once again approached what it was then. Thanks again for encouraging me to spend less time and effort on e-commerce, and more on my stock trading and stock trading software.

Here is the link to John's blog, which discusses this in more detail and provides more links.

What's Your Google Page Rank?

You can find out easily what the Google Page Rank (PR) is by going to the bottom of my site main page (link below). PR10 is the highest possible, attained by very few, if any. More common are lower than PR5. Pages that don't have any PR at all used to be listed as PR0, but now as N/A.

Pages with a rank of N/A may still be indexed by Google, but you are very unlikely to find them in the top ten PAGES of search results, much less in the top ten overall search results, for whatever your search term is. (Of course, if your search term/phrase is very specific to your page only, it will turn up, but that won't do you much good as others would be not be likely to search on that specific term/phrase.)

Here is the link: e-Commerce Business (Internet Business Biz Buzz) Web Site

Links for Manual Submission to Article Publishers

As you know, Google gives "brownie points" (Google love) for incoming links to your web sites. That is, they give you a better "page rank" -- you get higher in the list of search results for keywords and keyphrases that website browsers are looking for.

There are programs for automated submission of articles, like the Artemis article submission software from James D. Brausch. That is done by submitting the articles to an e-mail list.

But there are many sites that you may want to submit to that require manual submission. For that you need a list of URLs.

I have begun to compile a list of sites to submit articles manually to. Along with that, I am also including a list of sites to submit link exchange requests to.

A few of these sites are listed at my e-Commerce website. That list will be expanded on, from time-to-time, so check back every now and then. BTW, if you have any additional sources, you are invited to post a comment here. I will let you know at a later date about some article rewriting software I am developing that will reduce the "duplicate content penalty."