Technorati: invisible tags (again!)

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I've amended my post on the Firefox/Greasemonkey Technorati tag creator for Blogger users to add the following new sections:

"Displaying a horizontal line before the tags

If you want a horizontal line above the tags to separate them from the main part of your post, just use CSS. The whole block for the tags is given the class "tag_list" (with the tags themselves given the class "tags"). You can therefore style them anyway you like.

If you're not familiar with CSS, and you want a demarcating horizontal line above the tags, the easiest way (rather than amending the userscript) is to copy the following code and paste it into the head section of your template (just before the </head> line is fine), then save and republish:

.tag_list {
font-size:0;
border-top:1px solid #ccc;
}

Invisible tags?

From time to time I get questions about how to make the tags invisible. For all sorts of reasons, that's probably not a good idea e.g. it probably goes against the purpose of tags. Kevin Marks of Technorati thinks it doesn't make sense, and more to the point many believe that if you try to make your tags invisible, Technorati and other search engines won't like it and may decide not to index your posts. While leaving out the link text worked once upon a time, that doesn't mean it will always work - I wouldn't be surprised if Technorati for one tweak things to penalise those who leave out link text for tags by refusing to index their posts properly, if they haven't already.

Nevertheless if you really want to try invisible tags (and on your own head be it!), the best way to increase your chances of having them indexed is probably to have them there on the page, but just not displayed (and who knows whether the search engines would want to penalise that sort of thing too). In the case of this Magical Sheep tag creator, you can do that by copy/pasting this code to your template again in the head section e.g. just before the </head> line, then save and republish:

.tag_list {
display:none;
}

For some more discussion on invisible tags yes or no, see the comments to this post."

(In response to queries e.g. from Pumix. The ever-helpful Kirk, the King of Kode formerly known as Truckspy, first suggested the CSS solution to invisible tags etc.)

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