Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
I'm not sure there's anything inherently dishonest about creating meta keyword tags from linked words. Those keywords are real keywords for the article -- it seems like a pretty good proxy for what humans would enter into a separate field anyway, and yet it doesn't cost us any human labor.
I guess my question is: what's the downside? What's the harm? Generally being guilty of participating in something that other people manipulate unfairly doesn't strike me as a real downside.
--Jimbo