EranMalloch.com

Yes, it’s true. Tag and Ping has finally launched onto the market, and the hype surrounding this product from Sean Wu has got a large portion of the internet marketing world up in arms and semi-fighting between each other!

Wu, a 24 year old ‘kid‘ from Thailand claims to have cracked the ‘secret code To Instant, Unlimited Supply Of PageRank 5+ Backlinks From AUTHORITY SITES…‘. Further, he claims tag and ping is so effective that it puts the (in)famous blog and ping to shame!

Big claims for a young guy I’ve never heard of before (which means squat, ‘cos if he’s smart, he’s been under the radar for a few years making big bucks using Tag and Ping, before releasing it into the shark infested waters of the Internet Marketing fraternity).

Now, anything I say from here onwards is just opinion, since I haven’t seen a copy of Tag and Ping.

The short version to Tag and Ping, as I understand it, is that it involves getting links from Social Bookmarking sites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Furl (just to name a few). These links can generate web traffic back to your website IF they get a decent level of popularity from the net denizens who vote for them (this is the social bookmarking).

To give you an overview of Social Bookmarking, here’s what the folks at wikipedia have to say about it:

In a Social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with present-day (2006) search engines.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will “rank” a resource based on its perceived utility. This is a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

The 3 obvious bonuses here are:

1. You get traffic to your site to read your content if its popular (and this traffic is free), and
2. If you are lucky, you’ll also get the link to your site on the front page of these high PR sites, which may just lead to it spidering your site quickly, and
3. If your content is popular enough, you’ll also likely get links to it from other sites, which will improve your site’s link popularity (PR), which will also bring increased search engine traffic.

Now, ALL of these things are fantastic. I wouldn’t turn down any of them for a second…but here’s my biggest concern about this whole Tag and Ping thing…

It’s going to attract a bunch of black hat types (and the generally dumb) who will use and abuse this technique to get traffic to their sites (many of which will be little more than spam sites built to earn money from adsense with little real value to the internet – as if we deperately need 1 more spammy adsense site on mesothelioma cancer!!!).

If they use and abuse it too much, the whole benefit that these sorts of sites offer will be comprimised, and once again, they will spend a lot of their time and resources fighting the tag and ping equivalent of content spam!

So, while I believe that tag and ping (as a concept that has been freely available for some time now) is a valuable tool, and Sean Wu may well be a top bloke, I just hope that if you read this blog post, you might just take heed of what I say, and not go crazy with this whole tag/ping thing.

Please, do EVERYBODY a favor and be responsible in the use of it, and it will be there to benefit us all for years to come.