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.
