Monday, May 09, 2005
Tagging: Why Am I Not Excited?
Tagging – that buzzword doing the rounds just leaves me cold. 
Largely because as a someone who thinks first like an SEO and second as a blogger, I agree with Danny Sullivan that tagging is just a giant spam-magnet.
Tagging , in his words is “the idea that if everyone labels photos, blogs and so on, we'll more easily be able to find what we're looking for.”
He notes:
But all the interest (dare I say hype) is largely ignoring the fact that we've had tagging on the web for going on 10 years, and the experience on the search side is that it can't be trusted.
None of these search engines now or ever has made use of the tag in a way to let you perhaps see all the pages "tagged" to be on a particular subject. Why not? The data is largely useless.
What if we let a community do tagging. Hey, the community already does that through links. Links are a form of tagging pages. And what have we found? Links will get misused, if there's a possible financial gain involved.
According to a post at Threadwatch, tags are important because they allow your users to generate content and classify that content in their own unique way.
But people have been doing that anyway – through links, and appropriate anchor text. Google bombing was the outcome of it.
I may be wrong, but to me tagging just sounds like the next version (or an older one) of Google bombing. And we all know that THAT doesn’t work anymore.
