So, you saw my Experiment with tagging or somehow you found your way here… Congratulations.
The problem started when I noticed that a certain website linked to me because of 1 keyword I used in my tagging and blog. After writing up another story, I proved that you can skew the results and links back into your website by changing the keywords. To my surprise, I accidentally added a few more that where way off base of the article, so I vowed to see how many Link Blogs (I had to research the name of these) I could attract with odd keywords.
Now, based on past stories, I know before I even post the Tags that two websites will link in: http://blagsta.com/blogging-for-money and http://weblog-pla.net/. Past that, we’ll see what others I can find out in the wild. I also reserve the right to update the tags when I think of more since they’ll just be pinged out later. I won’t change the date of the article so that I won’t attract the same ones again and again. Oh, and with the original tags, the initial experiment post took over a full minute.
Update: 23Oct06
I was searching over the web for good tag related comments to see what other kind of filth I could attract with my experiment and ran across Lorelle’s comments on Tagging . Basically, it was agreed upon earlier in the year that Tags are not categories, but meta-data. I couldn’t agree more myself. Tags of today are like the meta-keywords of HTML past.
Unfortunately, Tagging has become such a major topic and, the new thing, that lots of people have latched onto it anyway they can to make money through Scraping & MFA Blogs.
Update: 14Jan07
I’ve removed the Full tagging experiment because of the amount of spam its attracting (120+ comments, mostly caught by Spam Karma). I also didn’t want it to lower my Google Page Rank (even though its already low) or possibly get me delisted from Google (In extreme situations, Google Does this).
It also helped attracted a heck of a lot of referrer spam. A certain group of sites are getting much better at hiding what they actually are with domains they buy due to people not keeping up with their domain registrations. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been fooled just by going through my logs. Normally, 1 referrer is enough to tell - so are a lot of the domain names, but occasionally, I’ll get one that fools me and gets me a dirty look from the Wife… Heck, I’ve even gotten weird looks due to the Online University programs that link in as well.
I’m also a little curious at the results I’m getting from different sites: (note: not all of these linked to the Blog Tagging Experiment)
- Porn sites (obviously) - lots of ‘em, and they get sneaky about the domain names.
- Online Universities
- Domain Tracking Companies (ie: Domain Grabbers)
- Domain Tools (IE: Domain Monitoring Companies) - this one surprised me a bit… Bad way to advertise.
- Casino Sites
- A full spectrum of Search Engines, including Private Search Engines for Universities or Scientific Research
- The normal comment spam everyone gets
Anywho - The links in helped my Technorati Rating a tad bit, but overall, it didn’t help my Google Rating, which stayed the same the whole time. So, overall, I’ll classify the experiment as a failure because it technically didn’t bring in more traffic for more advertising, etc. I probably won’t redo the experiment at a later date because the issues that it can cause with companies cracking down on Spam related sites.
