As stated in the article, yes, there is a potential for abuse with tags. As I have also said repeatedly, your blog will be more successful if it keeps to a specific topic instead of spread out all over the place. If SEO is really critical to you, then focus, focus, focus.

The question that really needs to be answered is also two-fold:

1) Are you really worried about your tags becoming abusive? Or other people’s use of tags?

2) Are you really worried about all the people you attract to your blog getting upset because an inappropriately used word (or tag) brought them there? If so, then consider reading Hook, Line and Sinker: Luring Blog Traffic to Stay.

thx for pointing out this excellent article when I asked you about an opinion about tag spamming.

still there are 2 points I would like to point out:

a) there is legitimate use of tags which leads to tag spamming: you could have a sidebar containing the top 25 tags of your blog, which is a very legitimate use, but still spams every single of your posts wand pages with this pletora of tags, which are not relevant to all your posts.

b) what about this popular shoutboxes a lot of people have in their sidebar? After analizing my logs I found that people came to my site via google searching for strange keywords, only after noticing that some ppl. chatting on my site had mentioned those keywords I understood why my site came up for some very strange keywords.

In my opinion it would be great to have some way of telling search engines to ignore content between 2 tags, i.e. I would put my top25 tags and my shoutbox into [ignore] [/ignore] and all would be ok.

any ideas / opinions ?

regards
Ovidiu

It troubles me a bit to realize that some folks are going to abuse use of them for search engine optimization.

I generally don’t have a problem with people trying to improve the ranking of their pages, so long as their pages have some content of value. What I don’t like is any kind of technique that inflates the ranking of pages that have little or no value at all except to their owner. I get very frustrated sometimes with the number of such pages that sometimes float to the top of some of my searches.

I don’t like the thought of regulating tags at all, though, because the whole point of tags was for it to be a human dictated experience. So what I might consider spam within a tag might not be what the author intends as spam. For instance, you might see a picture of clouds on Flickr, and the tag “happy” might be part of it. You may not equate happiness to that picture, but does that mean that tag is violating any rule? Regulating tags might make them obsolete, because it would end up putting a select few in control of them or a machine in control of them. That defies the whole point.

There are good and bad in every bunch. As in every day real life, why should we restrict those who have done no wrong? That’s what we do when we make new standards. It’s not as if we’re making them for the violators; people will abuse, no matter the system. So why look to change or amend something that we’re enjoying, simply because there are some spoilsports around? Block ‘em/don’t visit ‘em, and move on, I say.

Putting tags in the head of your page is another method, using them like keywords. It doesn’t help using tags as site search navigational aids.

Do not confuse splogs and abuse with looks or content. There are a lot of beautiful and clean looking sites which are very abusive. That’s how they succeed, because people judge them on the surface, not for their abusive tendencies. Yes, in the end, the abusers will lose out, but don’t confuse looks with good or bad. Evil is evil and it’s to the bone, not the surface.