“You can try to trick websites by embedding tag spam,” Steve Arnold, a speaker at the meeting, said. “It can work when the robot comes to the page, but it's misleading.”
Tag spam is a tag that has no relevance to the content of the site.
For example: a site about cooking could raise its Google ranking by inserting spam tags like “porn” and “Jenna Jameson.”
Rather than relying on tags to generate rankings, Arnold suggested that the content of the website be the sole guide.
“Why not just put the content up and let the content speak for itself?” Arnold asked at the meeting.
However, that question is a loaded one for the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. The $200 million dollar per year industry, according to Arnold, is “largely a waste of money.”
Many SEO industry leaders use tags liberally to boost site rankings, and consider spam to be a harsh and inaccurate description of the technique.
“Steve [Arnold] does seem to pine for the days when all documents were manually classified by trained librarians and researchers,” Mike Moran, an IBM executive, wrote on his blog. “Steve goes too far when he describes every technique that makes content attractive to a search engine as spam.”
Search engines like Yahoo and Google employ algorithms to discourage the practice of tag spamming. But according to Moran, manipulating tags is an important and vital part of Internet commerce, who noted that IBM had managed to jump its Product Lifecycle Management page from 175 to No. 1 on Google by adding a few keywords.
Still, Arnold insists that at the end of the day, only a set of international search standards will solve the problem.
