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The BBC reported this week the increase in user tagging.

The idea is that you can use tools like del.icio.us to bookmark pages that you like with words that mean something to you.  I use it, mainly for increasing linkage and ‘findability’ but very rarely to refer to for my own use. In an increasingly mobile world though, having bookmarks on-line does make sense.

The problem with them, however, is that the very fact that they are user-generated. Although this could be seen as a good thing, you also need to compete with bad tagging, as pointed out by SEO Book.

Other large sites have started following this tag example, and allow users to use non-descriptive labels like 2000, hip, and cool to tag their content.

This obviously flies in the face of trying to get relevant traffic by relevant linking. By handing more and more power to the user, we may become governed by more and more general vague noise, which in turn, will make a user search deeper!

Moral: Get relevant content on your website and watch the words that people are using - competitors and users alike.