In point of fact, you stated that labelling of spammers is OK, as long as it is not associated with SMO.

I strongly disagree with that, because I have proof of how that is being abused on sites like StumbleUpon to organise burying.

As for your categories, they are not working for you

Technorati are picking your categories up from scraping your front page, because they are not appearing in your feeds.

You are not using tags which other people might use, you have things like “Search In Pictures” which results in the tag search-in-pictures.

That doesn’t really give any relevance for any search engine, because no one else other than you uses that tag.

Regarding this one particular article, you are right, it is quite low on tags, but many of my posts have 20+, it really depends on the subject, and how I decide to distribute content over various duplicate content pages.

I am experimenting with how broken Google’s reporting of supplemental results is currently.

Most of the time I currently have 6-7000 pages cached, and supplemental results in single figures.

I certainly wouldn’t confuse tagging blog content within blog posts, and tagging on bookmarking sites that is just backlinks, and not an important part in Google’s ranking factors, heavily overlooked.

On a search term like Polish Gmail, which we both covered, should I be ranking both first and second, considering no one really linked to me?

For my site Google really should be showing around 20,000 indexed, of which at least 10K should be supplemental, and they really should remove that grey bar from pages that have pagerank but are determined to be duplicate.

From when I suggested it to Bumpzee, it only took a matter of 2 days to implement automatic tagging.

Blogcatalog have implemented it partially, though I think it was placed on the backburner for a few weeks as they certainly have a few other things to fix.

I should point out both of those communities don’t have loads of spam filters, but but they don’t need them because they have great ways for the community to police things, and sites are vetted before inclusion.

One way of demonstrating why that method of tagging is bad is to give some domain name examples which I am going to steal from Bonnie (I am sure she will appreciate the link), though it is not in the content at least it will be worth something.

Many people think using hyphens in domain names is a mistake. (I’m not one of them.) Perhaps the creators of these domain names should’ve considered using hyphens:

whorepresents.com (would’ve become who-represents.com)
expertsexchange.com (would’ve become experts-exchange.com)
penisisland.com (would’ve become pen-island.com)
therapistfinder.com (would’ve become therapist-finder.com)
viagrafix.com (would’ve become via-grafix.com)
Ihavegas.com (would’ve become iha-vegas.com)

The reverse is going to happen on MyBlogLog, and a blog tagged with expertsexchange is going to have their content listed with unrelated content.

Google treats “blogging tips” and “bloggingtips” differently – with a space you get relevant results, and without the space you get links to bloggingtips.com

I know it is only the URL for the tag page, and there can be a benefit in having additional variations of using the same tag with and without spacing. That is why I often use lots of different versions of the same tags where there is likely to be different usage. Recently “Stompernet” and “Stomper Net” or “Portal Feeder” and “Portalfeeder”

Tags which have a divider between words should keep it in some way.

“Use data from feeds?
That’s a really interesting idea. Right now we’re not actually capturing any of the data in the feed so it would require some extra work, but the idea has been added to the “future development” list.”

I think it is an idea that should be put on the front burner. In light of the present method which floods the page with unrelated tags
, it is apparant that this type of tagging is doing a great dis-service. As Andy mentioned earlier, if you want to browse through tags ala Delicious — then use their service.

Who else knows how to tag a post better than the author. I would not want to leave it in the hands of people that I don’t know, that is for sure.

But I also equate blog tags to META keywords. I once did a tag search for ScribeFire at Technorati and the first 7 pages was all porn blogs that were auto-generated at Live Journal.

Using a social bookmarking service such as Delicious can open Pandora’s box. It would only be a matter of time where some twisted frak would crawl out of the woodwork and label you with hundreds of perverted labels.

If you want to review the product, then review this. Tag people as schmoes? And would this be in addition to me as a community owner having to also (1) hide them and (2) report them as spam? I need now a third way to help MyBlogLog get its spam reporting problems under control? What, MyBlogLog wasn’t getting enough data to spot problem people from the activity in the first two areas?

Maybe the tagging in general might be useful, Andy (FYI, I tag ever single post at Search Engine Land in the form of our categories, which the main service that uses tags — Technorati — interprets. Hey, could be better — I could try to manually set things up so posts could be tagged in Delicious. But then again, you say you’re using tags, and I don’t see. I see you have links saying your pages are in different tag categories (exactly as I do), but you don’t associate those tags with bookmarking services that allow it.

Anyway, guess I’m puzzled. Right above this comment box you’ve got an ad telling people not to use nofollow, because spam does not equal blogs. But according to MyBlogLog, social media optimization does equal spam. Yeah, that’s well worth raising a few questions about, especially given the real pain in the ass MyBlogLog spam is for a community owner that MyBlogLog fails to provide real tools to (how hard can it be to make the default for communities NOT to show messages unless than allowed. Work on that first, then give us tags).