Things By Mike

No more than 24 hours ago I decided to jump in and try the whole viral tagging thing just to see what happens. I’ll admit I was skeptical as I usually am for these little projects. That’s because for them to actually work it depends heavily on people following through. In other words just because you put up a list full of viral tags, will the people you’ve linked to add your keywords to their tag list once they see a ping from you? Well so far the answer has been a resounding YES. In less than 24 hours I’ve received thirty nine new backlinks and I’m guessing that number is only going to increase for as long as people continue with the viral tagging experiment.

I see two big reasons why viral tagging was a positive thing.

• Huge increases in Technorati Authority are likely to occur. My authority rank has already improved from a little over 52,000 to just about 40,000 and it would seem it will continue to improve. You could probably argue that this is actually a false positive and you’d have a pretty good argument. Just like the whole Technorati Favorites experiment from a few weeks back, in the end my guess is viral tagging will probably ultimately be looked at as a way to game the system.
• Potential for new readers. One of the unique things about viral tags is that I have to visit all the sites that link back to me, so I can retrieve the keywords they choose to be linked with. By doing so there’s a good chance I’ll stumble onto great sites I may never have otherwise. Since people will also be visiting my site to retrieve my keywords there’s an equal chance that I could pick up some new readers as well. That’s always a good thing.

For me one question still remains though. Was this really be a good thing? Looking at the results it would seem to be hard to even fathom that it wasn’t, however I can’t help but wonder how long will it be until Google catches on and finds a way to penalize sites for viral tagging. If you’ve participated in the viral tagging experiment, what are your thoughts about it’s long term effects?