Tagging and SEO

For my 100th post, I thought I would take a look at tagging and see what, if any, implications it has for conventional present-day SEO and what impact it might have in the future.

First of all, what's this tagging business all about? That's the question I was asking myself when I first heard about it. Like RSS and Podcasting, here was a buzzword that got me worried - if I don't get into this will my site be left behind? I operate on a need to know basis, and I needed to know.

From initial research, it seems that there are two main players in tagging. These are del.icio.us and furl.net. These are sites which make it possible for users to 'tag' any web page.

Del.icio.us describes itself as "a social bookmarks manager". Del.icio.us decribe tags themselves as "one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark." Furl.net doesn't define tags, but says it is "a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages. It's your Personal Web."

So that's what they do. They are like online libraries for the web, and their members are an army of voluntary librarians, classifying the internet as they go.

So, both sites do basically the same thing, allowing users to put a label on a webpage that they have visited, so that they can easily find it again. Users have the option of making their tags public or private (where only the person themselves can see what they have previously tagged) or they can share tagged site information with other individual members. Where the tags are public, other visitors can then see the tags that have been assigned to particular sites by users.

But how is the actual tagging done? For both del.icio.us and furl.net, you must first sign up as a member. In both cases, you can then copy a button to your browser bookmarks toolbar, which allows you to tag webpages as you travel the net. There are two versions of the Furl button. One is linked to a pop-up dialogue box for entering tag descriptions. The second, non-pop-up version, jumps to the Furl.net page where the description (i.e. the tag) is entered. Del.icio.us also has two toolbar buttons, one allows you to see your existing tagged pages and the other is the button to add a tag to a page.

Both Furl and del.icio.us have a facility to tag sites without downloading any toolbar button. The user can login and enter the sitename and tag description directly from their personal page.

When you select a site for tagging, either by clicking the toolbar button or manually visiting your personal page, you must enter the relevant details. On Furl.net, these are the site title, url, rating (1-5, 5 being a rating of excellent), select a top line topic (or add a new one), an option to mark the page as read, another to mark it as a private page on your profile, enter the keywords, comments and clipping. It doesn't say which of these are compulsory - I left out a clipping. When I did this for SEO Chat forums, it said it was saved successfully, but Furl.net then brought me back to the entry page, rather than show me the result. I went off and found my personal page and sure enough, there was SEO Chat Forums, with a tag of SEO, a description of 'The best SEO discussion group on the net', and a rating of excellent!

Meanwhile, over at del.icio.us, I decided to try the same thing. Here, the requirements are the title, url, 'extended' (which I presumed to be an extended description), and the tag. Single words only are allowed, so 'Search Engine Optimization' won't work as a tag name, but 'Search-Engine-Optimization' will. When I saved the update, del.icio.us took me straight back to SEO Chat Forums, without any confirmation if my tag information had been saved successfully. When I checked, it was there alright, and because 'SEO' was an existing tag, it matched SEO Chat Forums to it. If you assign a tag which doesn't already exist to a site, del.icio.us will categories them as 'your' tags rather than general tags. They don't seem to be considered in any way inferior to existing tags.

So, the big question from our point of view, is there an SEO benefit to be got from tagging? Well, on face value, the answer is...maybe. If you follow the path of a SE spider to del.icio.us, it will see a listing of the most recently added sites, and also a list of the most popular tags. If, by chance, your site happens to have been tagged in the few minutes before the spider arrives, it should read the link to your site in the 'recently added' list. If your site has been tagged with one of the most popular tags, the link should get spidered because, while only the most recent results appear on the first page, there is an 'earlier' button that goes back through sites previously added to the same category. So the thing to do is apply a popular tag to your site, and a backlink to it should be spidered at least once. Sites that are tagged with obscure tags that you create do not seem to fall into the path of the spiders. A caveat here is that it's not clear how long pages tagged in a popular category are retained in the list, unlike Furl.net (see below).

One other way that you might be able to get a SEO benefit from del.icio.us: Your user name is used as anchor text to your site. So, if you called yourself 'SEO' and put your site down as SEOChat, this would serve as a backlink to SEOChat with anchor text of SEO.

If you tag other sites frequently, there is a good chance that your username will be spidered as a BL to your site. However, unlike a discussion forum, there is no member list page in del.icio.us, so if you don't actively tag, you won't have any chance of getting any benefit from this.

On Furl.net, there is also a list of the most recently tagged items, and also a list of the most popular categories. However, crucially, the list available to casual visitors, and thus SE spiders, only goes back one month. So any entries for a site in a popular category have a shelf-life of one month. Similarly, sites tagged with non-popular tags don't show up in a spiderable list.

One important consideration that I have looked at before writing this article is whether the tagging sites use the <rel=nofollow> function on links. This has the effect that SE spiders apply no importance to the link for ranking purposes. The pages themselves on both sites do not show this to be the case. A look at the rel=nofollow topic postings on the Google Blog make no reference to Furl.net or Del.icio.us as adopting <rel=nofollow> at this point.

I've opened this discussion to look at tagging from an SEO point of view, and have based this piece on observation and the principle that SE spiders follow publicly available links on websites. If anyone sees a fault or gap in my observations, please contribute your views.

One other issue that I will touch on briefly is the possibility of tagging being used by search engines in future as an addition or alternative to anchor text for determining SERP's. If a sufficient percentage of the web were to be tagged, an SE could use that data as an extra contributing factor in their algorithm. If for example, a user entered a search term of 'cars', the SE could look for sites that have been tagged the highest number of times with the tag of <cars>, rather than looking exclusively at backlinks with anchor text of 'cars'. Since a tagging site user can only tag a site with a particular tag once, it would make spamming search engines that bit more difficult.

I'm off to create my avatar now....

I might also mention another tagging site, Blinklist.com. Their main selling point is that they allow you to import your browser favourites to your account, and also you can store both public and private links. The site is focused on making it easier for users to organise their tagged sites.

On the SEO front, Blinklist largely the same pattern as del.icio.us and furl. A site must be tagged with one of the 500 most popular tags (or tagged very recently), or else the spiders won't find it.

There is also the smaller Connectedy.com. On this site's homepage, there is no list of recent/popular sites, so a spider would have to go fairly deep before it could find any links at all.

Here is another tagging site that may be of interest to people.

http://www.sitetagger.com

Thanks for the info. Why is this more useful to the user than just bookmarking the page?

It's a fair question.

Firstly, for anyone working as part of a group engaged on any kind of research, tagging allows online reference materials to be shared between group members. There is potential benefit for anyone involved in online collaboration with others. That's why tagging is sometimes called 'social bookmarking'.

Second, for the individual, tagging could be better than bookmarking if the person uses more than one PC (e.g. at home / at work). With tagging, they can get the same list of their favourite sites in one locations.

The third reason is the altruistic one: that a person who finds a useful page on a particular topic is willing to recommend it to the wider world by tagging it.

Personally I don't spend my time tagging sites all over the place. But there seem to be plenty of people who do, and mostly for the third reason above.

Thanks, got it -- it's communal bookmarking.

there are a few other sites much like this. Technorati and del.icio.us are probably some of the best sources for tagging. You can download some plugins to add to wordpress blog sites that auto-insert tags for techno and del.

Very interesting and informative.