Tag Spamming Is Not a Best Practice
by Chiara FoxThis weekend I attended the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. There was lots of talk about traffic to blogs, and what you can do to increase readership, and generally promote your blog. Most of advice made sense, but there was one thing mentioned that got my blood boiling.
I was in a session on DIY Content Syndication and Promotion, and one of the audience members asked how you could use tags to help with promotion. One of the speakers, I don’t remember which one, advised that the best way to use tags is think of the most general topic you post is about and tag with that. Also, if you are commenting on someone else’s post or video, you should copy all of their tags and add a few of your own.
Um… excuse me? Sure, that’s best practice if you want to add tag spam, water down results and piss off people when they come to your post only to find that you are tangentially related to the topic they are interested in. Remember, it was this broad spectrum, shotgun approach to tagging that taught search engines they couldn’t rely on the keywords metadata field..
The rules for tagging are very simple:
- Tag only significant mentions.
- Tag at the level the item is about.
- Use one tag per concept.
I like to use this rule of thumb to check to see if the tags I’ve chosen are accurate: If I did a search for the tag I’m considering, would I be happy getting this post/image/content item? If the answer is no, I drop that tag.
Following these rules to tagging insure that your tags are appropriate for your post/image/content item. Targeted tags help ensure that recall as well as precision are high. You want the folks who are interested in your specific topic to find your thing. If you are talking about the giant green dinosaur with glowing red eyes in South Dakota, you don’t want to tag your post with general terms like “United States” or “statues.” Better choices would be “Wall South Dakota,” “dinosaur statue,” “glowing red eyes,” and “kitschy roadside attractions.”
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July 21st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
But you also don’t want people who are looking for your topic to miss it because they didn’t make their search specific enough. What if they’re looking for that giant green dinosaur and type in “dinosaur” and “red eyes” and “south dakota”? They could miss all three of your tags because the left out “Wall”, “statue”, and “glowing”. Relevant tags are good practice, but specificity is tricky.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Great post,
Jason you have a good point but trying not to be to general is the key here. We all want traffic, and I may have done it before, but I try my best to keep the tags on topic.
July 21st, 2008 at 3:07 pm
And that is also the beauty of full-text search, which is what web search engines are. The general terms are going to be picked up and indexed automatically. The tags just add additional weighting for specific, targeted terms. They help move you up on the relevancy ladder. These factors all stack on top of each other. So if a term is in your general text, and your tags, and your page title, and you metadata description it’s seen as more relevant. (Yes, there are more nuances to SEO and relevancy than that, but at a fundamental level thats’ how it works.)
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:11 am
Isn’t this the basic complaint about folksonomies? Tagging like this is completely subjective. Are one-off tags really that useful?
I think it’s more important to have a cohesive tagging system for your content that works throughout your own site. If all your tags are so specific that they’re never reused, your tag cloud is useless.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Great post, it piqued my interest. Tagging is certainly becoming more relevant every day.
I take it from your post that this is mostly about blog tagging, and not the tagging of other webby things, like Flickr or del.icio.us or TwitPic, etc.
Point taken. I’d like to add a few observations, if I may. In the old days of searching, one needed to be pretty specific with one’s tag searches, because the search engine parsers weren’t very savvy, and |fake green dinosaur| would miss |green dinosaur| because of the former’s specificity. In SearchLand, a miss is as good as a mile.
Then came search engines with operators like |green AND dinosaur| and people got a lot more leeway - and desired results - using them. This made people search more (because they found it more useful), and this response added to the cat-and-mouse game of searchers vs. searched. The search engines got better, but more to the point, the searchers got better, too. People started figuring out that if they wanted to find that wacky dino, they could give more and more clues to the search engine like |green AND dinosaur AND usa AND park|.
I tag a lot of my outdoor photos on Flickr with “USA”. In the microcosm of Flickr, this is actually useful, because people on Flickr can leverage this affordance to their benefit. |norse AND statue AND hand AND usa| can give very different results from |norse AND statue AND hand|. In this fictitious example, I’m glad that people added “USA” as a tag.
Google isn’t a tag searcher per se, but it does interpret your query heuristically and gives surprisingly good results for whatever clumsy stab you have taken at it. This is GOOD. All search engines are going to do this in time, and tags like “USA” are valid in the long run because they are weighted (or will soon be weighted) in the result algorithm, and people are actually going to use them.
(aside: some wag gamed Flickr pretty effectively recently…Flickr has a rotating homepage with a photo du jour and a famous quotation from someone famous, with keywords like “fish”, “dream”, “bicycle” etc hyperlinked to Flickr’s global search engine. It’s simply Flickr candidly demonstrating their search capabilities. One fellow would wait until it changed and then tag all of his Flickr photos with the same keywords linked on the homepage, thereby ensuring his visibility to newcomers. THAT is “tag spamming: :))
Tags like |OMG Ken was so drunk|…well, I guess they won’t get a lot of hits. In my respectful opinion, |kitschy roadside attractions| may not get a lot more, even in the specific sphere of blogs.
Bloggers may very well rally around you in support, because blog tags like “depression” should not link to…well, something that has nothing to do with depression. Contextless fireworks photos, or something. That’s very frustrating.
Tag specificity works for searches that are specific to a site, or to a TYPE of site (blog, portfolio, tech support, book discussion). If I search omgfoodgasm.com for “proscuitto” I likely won’t see dogs. I would hope not, anyways. On this we agree.
However, I’m tagging all my USA and MARYLAND posts as such, so people can be more inclusive in their searches…using these newfangled savvy search thingies that are more and more ubiquitous.
I do take your point about how blog tags ought to be blog tags.
Well, thank you for letting me rant