SPAM TAGGING

Tagging systems allow users to interact proactively or annotate a pool of resources with descriptive strings which are called tags. In Del.icio.us, users annotate web pages that are interesting and they even write small descriptive terms for it. Basically tags are used to guide users to areas where they are interested. If a user likes a particular topic they will search for that topic and all the topics that are tagged with that search will appear. This will help user experience more pleasant and worthy.

In a way, tags are similar to anchor text, if we tag a topic with a particular keyword then the tag acts as the anchor text for that particular topic. In anchor text its pages and links but in tags its user's resources like photos, videos, slides etc. As we know search engine spam is everywhere and there is always a method to mislead the search engines. Same like any other spam tagging systems are susceptible to tag spam; misleading tags can be generated to make it look like it is relevant to the topic tagged.

Same like Google-bombing we can use tag-bombing in sites like del.icio.us ( now delicious.com ), where malicious group of people can tag a senior officer or ruler of a country with a name "idiot" and when someone searches for, they will see the president name with the idiot tag.

Same way mass spamming can happen where a same vendor will add lots of pages with same tags like "buy dresses" which will show only his results and burry his competitors.

Wordpress blogs support tags and a user can use the power of tagging which acts similar to anchor text to tag some pages with misleading tags. For example, he can tag a page saying "Britney spears" but the page itself will not be about "Britney spears"

Malicious tagging or spam tagging can confuse the search engines to understand a particular page wrong. Today tagging is a major search engine manipulation since search engines have started using social signals for ranking some websites.

Images

Screen Shots

The above screen shot depicts that the same video is tagged with three different names in order to boost the search engine rankings.

This image shows that the "idiot index" is tagged with so many of the above mentioned names. This is a clear example of spam tagging.

These are examples of same web pages that are tagged with different names to increase PageRank.

Working Example

Other site that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows

• Abuse keyword spamming versus spam tagging