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Monday 29 August 2005

Technorati: easily generating invisible tags






You can use invisible Technorati tags when tagging your posts, although Technorati frown on it (sorry, I didn't manage to transfer the original Haloscan comment by Kevin Marks before it got deleted after 4 months).

But to generate invisible tags easily, as requested by Aiuto, the simplest way is probably to use the usual bookmarklet or (if you have Firefox) Greasemonkey script - see this post. Then (suggestion courtesy of my Magical Sheep pardner Truckspy), you make the tags invisible through CSS by adding this to your blog template, between the <style type="text/css"> and the </style> tags in your head section.

.technoratitag {
display:none;
}

That ought to work and shouldn't stop Technorati from picking up your tags, assuming (assuming!) their bots read the source rather than the displayed page, but if anyone has problems do say. And remember Technorati (and possibly Google too) don't like invisible tags so they may well do something to stop invisible tags being indexed, so use 'em at your own risk! (I find it best to have my tags visible, but tiny, like in my posts).


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

9 comments:

Scott said...

You could also just put rel=tag in any link you create. Example [a href="" rel=tag]MyPage[/a]. Technorati would look at that and think there was a tag called 'MyPage' so it works best with one word links. The href part doesn't actually have to point to technorati.

Kevin Marks said...

Hiding your tags seems silly to me - if they aren't describing your post well, why not show them?
The point is that the linked tag should make sense to your readers.

Scott, that won't work, as it is the link that defines the tag, not the link text. It will also annoy your readers no end as they click on a link and don't go anywhere

Scott said...

No no..I mean an legitimate link like this one for IBM would create the tag 'IBM'
[a href="http://www.ibm.com/us/" rel=tag]IBM[/a]
BTW, IceRocket uses the same tag structure.

Scott said...

epeus...I stand corrected. I guess I never read the instructions that completely.

http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html

your URL does have to end in a tagname
but it doesn't have to point to technorati.
[a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag"]iPod[/a] creates the tag 'iPod'.

Improbulus said...

That's right Scott, as Kevin/epeus says, it's the last bit of the URL that gets picked up as the tag.

But I do see why some people want their tags to be invisible, so as not to clutter up their pages but with their posts still appearing on Technorati's and Icerocket's tag pages. As I've said before I personally think it should work both ways and you should give people the chance to find other similarly tagged posts if they want to, but I think it's up to the individual blogger. Of course the URLs don't have to point to Technorati, they could point instead to the relevant Del.icio.us tag pages, or Icerocket's tag pages, if the blogger wishes.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your post. I have inserted "display:none" and it works fine.
I like invisible tags because my blog would be a "humoristic" blog, so if I have to repeat some words (used in a post) into the tags, the final effect is not humoristic (i.e. I wrote a post on "enlarge your penis" spam; do you like see a tag: enlarge+your+penis, penis, enlarge...?).
Sorry for my english.

Cima
A.I.U.T.O.
Associazione Italiana Uomini Troppo Oppressi
http://aiuto.blogsome.com

Unknown said...

I create invisible tags by not putting in a word to link to. I want the tag so that people searching Technorati can find the post if they are searching for the tag, but I dont need words at the bottom of the post.

For example, if I were tagging the post as Politics, I would write the tag as: I just don't put the word "Politics" after the rel="tag". It works. Technorati recognizes it as a tag.

Is there anything wrong with doing invisible tags that way?

Unknown said...

Well it didn't show up in the previous post. I am not going to put it in brackets so that it doesn't disappear:
For a tag of politics I write:

(a href="http://technorati.com/tag/politics" rel="tag)(/a)

I don't put the word politics between the two html tags.

Improbulus said...

Cima, what you say makes sense - a valid use of invisible tags, to me, in the context of your blog.

Gary, that's right, I mentioned the "not putting in a word to link to" method in a previous post and at the moment it seems to work though Technorati don't like it (so they may tweak things to stop it working, at some point!). But when using a tag generator, the CSS way is easiest I think.