Late last month, we saw the emergence of WordPress 2.3, introducing several new features and improvements over the outgoing version of everyone’s favorite CMS. The WordPress development team outlined some of these new features, but our very own Gary Jones pointed out two of the most notable: native tagging support and plug-in update notifications.

The first can prove useful for search engine optimization, telling the bots at Google, Yahoo!, MSN and so on what each blog post is all about, in case they can’t figure it out from the content itself. It also helps you cash in on certain keywords if that’s what you want to do. The plug-in update notification will keep you up-to-date with all your plug-ins, just as the WordPress blog reminds you when a new version of the blogging platform is available.

One change that has sparked some controversy is the departure from Technorati to track incoming links. If you’ve installed (or upgraded to) WordPress 2.3, you’ll notice that the incoming links indicated on your dashboard are being served up by Google Blogsearch. This is why many people were complaining that the “incoming links” were largely their own. For example, after this post goes live, I’ll see an “incoming link” from this older post that I am linking to.

For people wanting to know where their traffic is coming from and who’s actually reading their blog material, this switch can be very frustrating. Now, I’m not “in the know”, so to speak, but I’m beginning to wonder if this switch from Technorati to Google Blogsearch is indicative of a relationship building between Google and WordPress. Google is known to buy out popular places like Blogger and YouTube, so WordPress could be the next frontier. Adsense integration as part of the next WordPress update, perhaps?