User Generated Tags Are Useless Noise

Just after starting my blog, I began adding tags, but given how few people found the site that way, I gave up. I'm a Records Manager by training and know that there are so many ways that different people access the same information, that my tags would be entirely irrelevant to most people's search terms.

Instead of rely on keyword rich content, and I forget about the tags. Too much work for too little return.

great article, I have been doing a bit of research into tags tonight with regard to SEO.

Tagging is a threat to many factors (eg. IA, taxonomy) so great argument on the SEO front.

I would have to agree. I get about 1/4 as many hits from Technorati as I send to it. I've started to post links to related blogs covering the same topic, which I think is probably a better log term strategy.

Hmmm. I'm not sure that I agree 100%. I incorporate tags in two areas, here's why:
1. A tag cloud page - this provides a visual representation of the topics that I am discussing on my blog and is a user-selected page.
2. Within the notes of my single blog article. It's not intrusive; however, it allows readers to 'pivot' on a topic to read other articles I've tagged with the same phrase.

I will admit that these sources are not a 'huge' source of interaction on my site, but I also don't think they are useless. As well, if they are not intrusive - they are not 'noise'. For the few folks that use them (according to my analytics), I'm guessing that they like them!

I would also add that tagging has not yet reached its peak of usefulness. I like the fact that when I bookmark a page, that my del.icio.us plugin finds the tags and auto-generates suggestions for me. It makes it much easier to categorize and search my bookmarks.

Respectfully,
Doug

I agree with you on this.

I no longer use tags, they added nothing, and I could never figure our why if a tag wasn't a keyword, then what was it.

I have yet to read a coherent account of tags versus keywords, and the why the alleged superiority of the former is real.

I'm not a huge fan of tagging applied to all things but I think the points you are making in this article is severely myopic. Tag based taxonomy was not originally introduced for the purpose generate scraped pages. Rather it was an alternative "personal" way of applying flat, non-hierarchical information retrieval system for one's own content. As such, it was a model that aimed to address the problems inherent with traditional nested classification and navigation systems (always too loose or too deep). It also a lot of sense of non-structural personal data such as images (think flickr). I also want to point out, the intention behind relying on tagging system is not to let "users outside of your business interests control your information", it's to allow users control THEIR data they way THEY want to. You're right. Other people's labels like "hip" and "cool" is useless to me. But I know exactly what "I" meant when "I" tagged items with those same keyword. It's a personal classification system that makes sense to ME.

I totally agree with you that it is good to let THEM control THEIR data about how they want to access stuff, but as soon as I start showing it to my users and letting it affect my site structure and how my site describes itself to other users and search engines it becomes MY problem.

I like Del.icio.us as a user, but there is a difference between being a bookmarking site and letting bookmarks overrun your site, and people won't see a user generated tag cloud on any of my content sites anytime soon.

So, the quick summary is: owner-tagged good (sometimes), user-tagged bad?

Counterexample: I find the tagging on Fickr quite useful for search, and it includes tagging from users (friends and family only, I think)

(Although some flickrites do need to learn how to tag!)

Flickr has almost textual content without their tagging. Most sites are text heavy without user tagging.

It is all about relative signal to noise.

totally agree, in fact here is a similar post that I wrote sometime ago:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/are-technorati-tags-useless/

I'm wondering if anybody here has looked at the concept of "taxonomy directed folksonomies" and what you think of them.

Essentially, this is a compromise between a folksonomy (user generated chaos) and a controlled taxonomy (top-down control, need for users to learn valid tags) by defining a taxonomy that the user is encouraged to use in some kind of a context-sensitive fashion, yet still allowing users to create tags.

The potential benefit of this that I see is that flow within a site can be restricted to well-trodden, well-defined tags that have been predefined.

User-defined tags could still be used but wouldn't be displayed in tag clouds, etc. and would only be visible within certain contexts where they would prove more useful.

I've never worked on anything like this personally but it sounds promising to me.

I use tags on my own blog for one reason - it gets search engine traffic. Yes, tags are a bit spammy, but the whole point is that at the end of the day they DO drive search engine traffic if you use them right. If you are trying to target a specific phrase or something like that, they provide a very flexable way to do that. Pointing your tags to technorati is a bit of a waste, but if you use them to generate content pages they are a much more flexable system than categories.

Now what if it's a site like mine, with 8,000 venues, and I don't want to 'tag' them all myself? I am actually writing a module that will allow users to 'tag' venues with words like "fish fry" or "coffee house", knowing that I'll probably get some noise along with useful user interaction.

Without user participation, the user feels they are void of any worth at certain types of sites - technorati without user interaction is worthless, so it fits the business model there. I wouldn't, however, open up Microsoft.com to end user tagging - I could only imagine ;-)

My tagging extends as far as my personal Delicious and StumbleUpon accounts. I think the post categories on my blog are enough to tell the user what topics we're discussing (and they don't require me to add a bunch of other sites' code and links for no reason.)

I get 50% of my search traffic to yummy duplicate content tag pages, and not a link to Technorati leaking juice in sight.

Tagging introduces lots of LSI related links, and my belief is that Google likes tags as part of their LSI calculations.

So you are saying that every single url (tags, user profiles, user comments pages, print versions etc.) are just useless regarding building SE traffic and ranking for some terms? It's better to block all this pages without real content?

Couldn't agree more. I will decide what tags to assign to posts. Not my readers. I use tags on my blog because they help readers find similar local content to read. I also like the fact that my tags show up on Technorati. But I have no outbound links to Technorati on my pages.

I've recently blocked all my tag archive pages in robots.txt since they often end up being VERY simllar and I don't want to be penalized by Google for having tons of virtually identical pages on my site!

Tags have their place. They can be very helpful to local readers and generating inbound traffic from Technorati.

The thing why tags are garbage is because people like to have a limited set of possibilities.
I see the problem when I need to post another link to my del.icio.us account, I have many many tags with only one url assigned to it. Ready made categories are far better.