For a while now I’ve been using the tags feature of MovableType which those in the know will be aware is completely useless outside of your own blog. It’s a nice feature to tag your entries and allow others to search within your tag base but serves no purpose at all for search engines such as Technorati. You’d think that somebody would have written a plugin at this stage to counter this problem. Alas, no.
At the moment Technorati will take MovableType categories and use these as tags, which is very few in my case. So, I read the Technorati docs on how tags work for them and added the appropriate rel=”tag” attribute to my tag links, within my MovableType template, believing that this would work. Two days on and several updates but no change in the tags picked up by Technorati. So I read more. I noted that my atom feed also displayed category tags and that these corresponded to the tags picked up by Technorati. Hmmm…
So a quick modification to my atom template within MovableType to include the following within the entry tags:
<MTEntryIfTagged> <MTEntryTags> <category term="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>" /> </MTEntryTags> </MTEntryIfTagged>
Now I play the waiting game and see if it proves successful – this post should start the ball rolling. 🙂
UPDATE: this entry just trickled through Technorati and the tags I attributed to it are all showing up. 🙂 So no need for fancy plugins, etc just the code I listed above.