Collaborative tagging is nothing but creating tags of keywords related to a particular shared content by various people online, which may help search engines to easily identify the theme and relevancy of items to rank in SERP’s.
Collaborative tagging is also known as Folksonomy which means creating and managing tags to categorize content.
What is it and How it is implemented:
• This tagging concept is totally depend on the Internet users and the keywords used as a tag is created by the users
• Collaborative tagging allows users to tag bookmarks, photographs, pictures, videos’s,blogs and educational website etc.
• This helps users to manage and share their favorite URL’s in social network sites.
• Folksonomy, is characteristic of Web 2.0 services, allows non expert users to find information which are collectively classified.
• It is the classification of items in groups.
• The best examples of Folksonomy are delicious, and most of the social networking websites with web 2.0 are also included in this.
• Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.
• Google image labeler uses collaborative tagging, this shows that google have started using this technology long back in this game.
• Most of the search engines displays results by matching the search query (keyword) and the keywords used in the website, So the keyword phrases has to be implemented in the websites, hence collaborative tags plays a major part here by providing keyword tags in social network websites.
Advantages of collaborative tagging:
• Collaborative tagging plays its part only if the usage of tag frequency is more for an item and it has to be maintained forever for the item.
• Tagging allows users to provide labels for pictures.
• Tags allow users to know the maximum number of keywords used frequently in the network and they can view the content that corresponds to that tag by clicking on it.
• Tag cloud shows a large collection of tags and if the visual size of the tag is big then it represents that the number of times the tag applied to a single item is more when compared to the other items in the website.
• Geotag which is given in flicker photographs can be used to display those images in maps
• Folksonomy helps in sematic web search. Sematics search displays results with the similar meaning of the search query.
• Tag clouds helps to easily identify information in the website without entering a search query.
Disadvantages of collaborative tagging:
• Laymen can provide tags which are not relevant for an item and this may cause confusion for displaying results for keywords and these types of tags are known as polysemous tags for eg: “windows” which describes two types of meanings.
• The number of tags increases as different users provide their own tags. The tags may get diluted as different keyword tags are used for the same meaning.
(July 2009) (
