David Breyer’s article on putting Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati and Slashdot buttons in your WordPress blog is brilliant and a must have if you are going for good SEO page ranking. It also makes it easy for users of Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, and Slashdot to add your article to their tag service.
BUT…it begs the question: Should you do this?
The technique is simple, just add David Breyer’s helpful code to your single.php or index.php template file in your WordPress Theme, but should you?
Ask yourself if every post you write needs such links?
In order to get tagged by users, your posts need to be worthy of recognition and rememberance. In other words, worth saving and of value to many people.
Not everything written appeals to everyone. And not everything written in a blog appeals to everyone or every tagging service.
Digg specializes only in articles dealing with technological issues and products like hi-tech, blogging, Internet, web, computers, space, music, video, and cell. Technorati and Del.icio.us cover a wide spectrum, as does Spurl, Furl, Bloglines, and others, though the most popular topics tend to cover technology, current events, and politics. Slashdot has several categories of subjects, but they also tend to cover technology for the most part.
If you are blogging about your family, hobby, or just the facts of your day-to-day life, do you need such links? No. If your blogging style is to just provide blockquotes and links to information on other sites, then you probably shouldn’t include links to these tagging services either, since the tagged site needs to be the original site with the content, not a post linking to the content.
If you are blogging with original, information-stuffed content, then yes, you should include such tagging links to help users add your content information to their tagging services.
It’s up to you to include or not include such links but do so wisely. Otherwise, they just clutter up your nice looking blog. For those who are serious about tagging articles to their tagging services, they will be using tagging bookmarklets and tools that will allow them to quickly add your post to their tag service, so they will ignore whatever links you supply.
Use these wisely and intelligently so they retain their power and are not abused.
Related Articles
- A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and wordpress.com Users
- Tags and Tagging in WordPress
- Getting Dug with Digg Can Sting
- Social Bookmarking Managers – And the Winner Is?
- Adding Post to Spurl Button on Your WordPress Posts
- Benefits of Using Furl and Del.icio.us Together for Research
- Digging Into Digg – What’s Behind the Curtain
- New Toys for Digg Fans
- Getting the Most Out of Digg Traffic Explored
- You, Too, Can Get to the Top in Del.icio.us Most Popular Posts
- Oh, The Joy of Being Slashdotted and Dugg
- Give a Wink and a Smile
Site Search Tags: tag, tagging, technorati, del.icio.us, blog, furl, spurl, slashdot, digg, links, wordpress
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
4 Comments
Lorelle: can you clarify what you mean by “Use these wisely and intelligently so they retain their power and are not abused.”?
Are you referring to only using tags appropriate to the context of the post or something else?
Good question.
Tags are abused when everyone tags everything and everything is submitted to tagging services. It dilutes the value of the tagging process.
I’m talking about including tag submission links on every post, which are to, supposedly, encourage visitors to tag your posts. As an example of a worth post for consideration to submit to a tagging service such as Digg, submitting a post about buying a car to a tag service may help many users who need to know details on buying a car. But if you are driving your car around and having random thoughts on life, the universe, and everything, then submitting such a post to Digg just doesn’t help Digg users very much.
Personally, I think that if your general posting style is to reference other sites rather than generate your own content, then Digg or submit the original post to a tagging service and then link to the article you found interesting on your blog. Don’t submit your post citing the original post to a tagging service. A lot of “how to get top page rank fast” promoters are including the instructions: 1) Hit pinging services, 2) submit post to tagging services… Not every post deserves a tag submission. There are many ways to abuse tags, and we all hate it when the spammers abuse them, so as users, let’s try to practise self control.
For using tags on your posts, that’s up to you. For abuse, I am discussing submitting posts to tag services in general. There is enough crap out there, let’s try not to over-fertilize.
Somebody posted a comment at David Breyer’s site that there is something wrong with the code – the quotation marks are not proper… I am not familiar with PHP. I was wondering if this is true.
Thanks!
This is almost always true. 😀 Change all quote marks to REAL quote marks with search and replace in a text editor. Do the same with apostrophes.
For information on text editors, see Free Text Only Editors for Templates, PHP, HTML, CSS, and More.
For information on publishing code on your blog, see WordPress.com Blog Bling: Signatures and Writing Code.
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