Amazon Tags are Ripe for Spam
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?