Are Technorati Tags Useless?

Sometime ago there was a strong buzz around the blogosphere about adding the Technorati tags to blogs. If you head to the Technorati help section, in fact, you will find the following advice:

When you add Tags to your post, this will allow your posts to be listed in Technorati’s tag search from “http://technorati.com/tags”. To add the tags, add the below code for each tag you’d like add to your post into the body of your post (very important, since we only read tags if they are in the body of the post)

Apart from Technorati’s advice to include the tags on blog posts there were a lot of bloggers defending the case, and the main arguments that I heard were:

• technorati tags will allow more people to find your blog
• technorati tags will increase the traffic coming from Technorati
• technorati tags will increase the keyword density of your posts
• technorati tags will increase your search engine traffic

The arguments were quite convincing, and since one out of two blogs that I visited were actually using the tags I decided to give it a shot. On the following weeks I did receive a couple of extra visitors from Technorati, and the number of people coming through search engines like Google was also increasing steadily so I decided to leave the tags where they were.

A couple of months ago, however, I completely redesigned my blog and the process removed the Technorati tags from the template. Before placing them back to the blog I decided to monitor the statistics for a couple of weeks, and to my surprise the number of visitors coming from Technorati was exactly equal to the period when the tags were on. The number of search engine referrals was also still growing on the same pace as before.

You can guess that at his point I was getting skeptical about the usefulness of the tags. In order to get a more clear picture of the situation I decided to research about the Top 100 Popular blogs on Technorati, and here is the results I gathered:

• out of the 100 most popular blogs only 7 were using tags in blog posts
• of those who did, 4 were using internal tags (i.e. Tags linking to internal pages)
• only 3 out of 100 were actually using the Technorati Tags (i.e. Linking to Technorati)

The results speak for themselves. If that was not enough I also checked 9 of the most popular SEO blogs on the Internet (you can check the list here). Those guys are supposed to know their way around search engine optimization, and none of them were using the Technorati tags.

Summing up, there is very little evidence in favor of using the Technorati tags. If you are still using the tags you should reconsider the value that they bring to your blog, and whether they are not just cluttering your template.