Since late last night the Technorati search feed I use for WordPress news has been filling up with hundreds of posts from sites. The vast majority of these posts have nothing to do with WordPress, and most don’t even include Technorati tags!
For example this is the site that’s currently at the top of the search feed; http://www.aggiegeeks.com/wordpress/?p=57
It seems clear something has become broken with the method Technorati uses to catalogue sites. This is backed up by the Technorati Graph that displays the number of posts that are tagged with WordPress. There’s a spike that begins on the 17th and has increased today.
I wonder if Technorati is attempting to catalogue posts based on their content, and as a result pulling in all sites that contain a “powered by WordPress” comment. Whatever the problem, it’s very annoying and my finger is hovering over the unsubscribe button







2006/10/19, 02:31
Actually, it’s WordPress’s tag support that is broken. They use the markup:
<a href=”http://www.aggiegeeks.com/wordpress/?cat=3″ title=”View all posts in General” rel=”category tag”>General</a>
when the rel-tag spec says that the last path component defines the tag.
They should only use rel=”tag” when the plug-in that makes proper tag urls is running. Thanks for the warning, I’ll adjust our spiders to cope.
I suggest using the bunnytags plugin if you can’t use the correct tag urls
2006/10/20, 14:09
Andrew thank you for discovering this. Thank you Kevin for doing the initial investigation. I have reported this bug to our bug tracker, and Mark Jaquith is generously looking into the cause and working on solutions.
2007/09/08, 14:03
This is my first post
just saying HI