Will Search Engines Eventually Start Ignoring Post Tags?

March 9th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

I was just about to go to bed when I saw this story on 901am that I decided I’d better post about now as I’m so tired I’ll forget when I wake up.

The post exposes some sites that 901am discovered were adding tags to their posts that weren’t relevant to the actual posts, in this case sex tags. Don’t ask me why the editors of 901am were looking for sex tags….DanAndJennifer would probably tell me this is very healthy and relationship building ;-)

Anyway, what this has made me realise that the growing trend of tagging posts is open to the same sort of abuse as meta tags were in the late 90s/early 00s, where webmasters would add totally unrelated meta tags such as ‘nude’ and ‘free pics’ to try and get traffic from search engine users looking for these terms. Most search engines countered this by downgrading the importance of Meta Tags in their scoring algorithms, or ignoring them altogether.

I bet that Howard Lindzon’s and Fred Wilson’s Wallstrip aren’t the only sites trying to take advantage of post tags, and the problem is only going to get worse. How long do you think it will take before search engines like Google start to ignore post tags? Do you think they have started already? Do you think there is anything that can be done now so that post tags will remain a useful user tool, before they fall out of use due to abuse?

Right, time for bed.

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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  1. #12

    Comment by Everton on 11 March 2007:

    and he has some header code in the META spaces which says it is used for tracking and not to delete it - I am wondering if it is okay to replace it with something like Tags in the Head?

    If you use Simple Tags it automatically adds tags and categories to your meta tags if you want

  2. #11

    Comment by Mark from Bloglyne.com on 11 March 2007:

    Thanks Dan & Everton. Great follow-up comments!

    It is funny how these things work out - before I read this article, I was looking at tryinig to optimize header META information, but, since I am using Everton’s TypoXP theme and he has some header code in the META spaces which says it is used for tracking and not to delete it - I am wondering if it is okay to replace it with something like Tags in the Head?

    *sighs* it seems our work is never done :)

    Also, thank you for the idea of a “test blog” I have been making all of my changes live … How did you set up the test blog? Did you buy a new url? Or create a sub-domain? This is a great idea and one you could write an article about

    BTW - when my site is back up (GoDaddy is having some trouble right now) check out my latest post on getting one way PR 9 links pointing back at your site - I have my first YouTube video as part of the post *grins*

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