Do you consider tags useful?

Do you allow thread tagging on your site? Are there any benefits resulting from tagging threads?

 

i think tags are useable, but in a limited amount. try to use tags that represent your thread title and also present in thread content

 

I think tags have their place but often aren't used properly, if at all.

A good example of a well-used tagging system is Stack Overflow, new tags can't be added by relatively new members, you have a limit to the amount of tags you can add and the tagging system is quite visible when posting a question. These factors result in a website which is quite easily navigated and helps people find specific questions around specific things which is awesome.

People actually rely on the tagging system on there, on forums, people don't even search, they just create threads, if tagging systems were used, there'd be a lot less duplicate threads with duplicate information and instead, more richer, unique content.

However, this isn't an ideal world.

 

It depends on the topic of the forum. I've just introduced them and it's proving to be really helpful. You can get a mod to filter by prefixes from vbulletin.org and then create links to those filters straight on the main page of your forum. One click and users can find all the posts on a certain topic. Not only that it also helps members understand what they should be posting in each forum. Then just create another link with "All Posts" so that people can get back to seeing all the posts and prefixes. Works awesome! I'm so happy with it compared to say using subforums which can be confusing and tend to dilute and kill the discussion on smaller forums.

Check out my sub forum on 2 stroke engines here for an example of how I am using prefixes: http://www.motoredbikes.com/forumdisplay.php?108-2-Stroke-Engines This forum topic gets the same newbie questions over and over again. With prefixes you can click [Engine Trouble] and bam 100 posts on engine trouble to look through (there will probably be 1000 posts under this topic by the time I finish adding prefixes to the rest of the posts).

 

Tags are useful, but i have had a bad experience using them on a VBulletin powered forum. On each tag page, meta description remains same. Its not like a thread page, where meta description is generated from content and thus unique. I have had a look at Google index, and was surprised to see each an every thread page with same meta description. No doubt, its not good for SEO reasons, and had to edit templates, to generate meta description based on tag being searched.

I was under the impression that VBulletin will take care of SEO friendliness of all tags pages, but they proved me wrong. I had to spend time optimizing template files to make it more SEO friendly. BTW, that's not true for only tag page, but also for member profile pages, search results etc... By default, the will use global description on each of above mentioned page, which looks real bad on Google's index, and hurts SEO.

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SSC: Yeah, I had to change lots of templates too. My meta decriptions consist of something like this: general description of the page + actual content, e.g. thread title.

Have you managed to put searched keywords in the meta description tag? vBulletin puts there HTML tags (for example <b> and <i>, so it looks silly).

 

Yup, it does looks silly, and i have wasted some good no# of hours to remove those ugly markup tags (underline, bold)... Currently, my meta description for tags pages looks like this:

"Search results for Tag: internet"

Where first part remains static (Search results for), and last part changes with every search (Tag: Internet)... I had to edit one PHP file in /vb/search/ directory to get rid of those markup tags.

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Why wouldn't you allow thread tagging? It makes threads much easier to find through Google searches and forum searches.

 

I have always enabled tags, but only a very limited amount. For Forum's of a specific purpose, I don't really think they are that useful.

 

Do you know how to remove links to user profiles from the variable criteriaDisplay? They are displayed when searching for threads made by a user. I couldn't find a single occurrence of "href" in the whole /vb directory.

 

you should have auto tag generator taking contents from titles specially, you may also set to take contents from thread if you wish but title tags worth.