I’ve called repeatedly for WordPress.com to change this since the beginning, even to offer us an alternative, but so far – well, maybe your call will have more luck.

I believe the way wordpress.com uses tags is beneficial mostly to wordpress.com, but not to individual blogs. Because a tag under a blog post goes to the wordpress.com tag page and not vice versa. Also if I tag a post, the tag page shows up first in Google, before my actual post (I have seen it several times). And in time the wp.com global tag page gets populated with posts that are more recent then mine and there’s always a chance that the Googler may end up being distracted once (s)he gets to the tag page and view some other post that may not be even written in my blog! Besides, isn’t it better if a Googler can reach my blog straight from Google, rather than via wp.com global tag page?

I get fairly good search results for my blog in Google. A lot of posts are in Google’s first page if I check the search terms I get in my stats. So I am not bothered about not having “extra traffic” from wp.com global tag pages.

Technorati doesn’t help search engines. Tags can help search engines. Tags are not affiliated or belong to Technorati. They are an attribute found in the link HTML tag. So far, Technorati is the only one recognizing the attribute, though Google talked about it. None of the other search engines do, that I’ve found out.

Tags are keywords, or should be, and any use of good keywords, tagged or not, helps search engines and searchers index your content better. It’s not exclusive to tagging.

As for what you said about technorati tags I use theme for one reason I once read an article that said Techonorati help search engines figure out what is your post is all about ( I don’t know if it is true but what I know is that I am really considering removing it ASAP ).