I’ve noticed that a lot of “amazon.com/tag” URL’s are appearing in the SERP’s for some brand-specific terms. From an SEO standpoint, it’s a heck of an idea. Maximizing the strength of your domain is always good.
Specifically, if you do a site:www.amazon.com/tag/ search in Google, you end up with 3,730,000 results. Basically, every term that anyone has ever tagged a product with is given its own URL. Here’s where the problem lies.
Some of the tags are brand names (like chanel, powerbar, etc.). Of course, Amazon sells some of their products, so I can understand it. But what about URL’s like the following:
http://www.amazon.com/tag/clearchannel
What is Amazon selling that has to do with Clear Channel? Currently, there are two items that are tagged “clearchannel”.
Is this a step backwards, sort of like the META Keyword tags of long ago? Couldn’t I tag my product with my competitor’s name, which is happening right now for the PowerBar tag, by multiple competitors?
Let’s look at an example of what I would consider an over-zealous use of the tags.
The product titled “Juicy Inspired Gold Plated Heart & Charms Couture Necklace” has three tags. They are:
Juicy – This makes sense
Couture – Kind of
Chanel – WTF?
Also, there aren’t any tags for “necklace”, “jewelry”, or “charms”.
Doesn’t this lower the value of the Chanel and PowerBar brands? What kind of recourse do they have?
Finally, what’s the answer? I think tagging has a lot of legs (blogs, de.licio.us, etc.), but what can be done in instances like this?
If you like this post you might enjoy following me on Twitter: twitter.com/danperry
Popularity: 1% [?]
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Most people never see those pages unless they really want to look at the tags for some reason, or they see the page listed in Google. Tags are used by Amazon to populate product pages with similar products which have been categorized (ie., tagged) by their customers. The mistakes you see are primarily user errors that are made when customers tag the products.
The reason the TAG pages are public and can be found in Google is because Amazon has found a clever way to use the tags as Search Engine SPAM. As customers tag products with unique keywords, Amazon dynamically creates a page for each new tag. These pages, as you’ve seen, include links to all the similarly tagged products, a forum, links and any other related content and even advertising.
The purpose is to create millions of interlinked pages with keyword-embedded links and DESTROY everyone else on the planet in relevance to those keywords. With 6,360,000 useless pages (I just checked) connecting products to their related keywords, some would call it GENIUS. Any spammer would give his left arm to do that. Why Google let’s them get away with it, I don’t know. Special treatment?
So, anyway, I think the answer is Search Engine SPAM. A) The TAG pages really have no other value. B) There’s no reason for those tags to be exposed to the public other than as juicy keyword SPAM. C) If it looks like a duck… Yeah, it’s definitely Search Engine SPAM.