Do the Search Engines Find Your Tags?

Short Answer:  Yes.

Long Answer:  There was a discussion if tags on CafePress show up in the search engines in the forums.  Basically this question was asked and a lot of the top shopkeepers sounded in on the subject.  Some believing that only CafePress Marketplace (MP) uses the tags, some believing the search engines use them too.  One suggested doing a test to find out, because he had done a test and did find out.  So on March 1, 2009, I did a test. 

That's Blogalicious

I used the From Pink Slip shop, and uploaded a design that said “That’s Blogalicious“.  I tagged this like I normally would (see some tips on tagging on a previous post.)  But I also included 2 separate tags.  1 tag was a nonsense word that yields very few Google results (lets call this “nonsense”).  The other was my personal tag (mentioned in several previous posts), (lets call this “personal”). 

After tagging, applying the design to a section (all products in one group), I did a search in the CafePress MP.  I searched for my personal tag, and nothing came up.  I then searched for That’s Blogalicious and some results came up, but not mine.  There is a short section that lists some related searches though - this gives you a bunch of words that have also been tagged in people’s designs.  This list contained ALL of my words that I tagged.  It contained both “personal”, and “nonsense”.  I did not click on either because I did not want to skew the results.

About 3 days later I went back to the MP and did a search for my personal tag and it did pull up products.  This is usually a standard question in the forums “how come my designs aren’t showing up in the marketplace?”.  Wait a couple days.  Mine took about 3 days for the designs to show, even though the tags were in there immediately.  Also, this is not a hard number, sometimes my designs show in 1 day, sometimes longer. 

After my design showed in the MP search, I did Google searches on both my personal and the nonsense word.  I only used the word, I did not use “shirt” or “mug” or anything like that.  The results did not show my designs.

On March 17th however, both searches brought up CafePress links.  The search on the personal tag brought up nothing but CafePress Marketplace results (which is the way I would expect because nobody else has that personal word on their websites).  The result looked like this:  shop.cafepress.com/personal  That type of webaddress means it will bring you to the CafePress Marketplace.

The search for the nonsense word yielded the same results it had before, but on page 2 in the 3rd position, there was a CafePress Marketplace result.  shop.cafepress.com/nonsense   Clicking it brought me to a marketplace search which showed my products.

Bottom line, yes the search engines can find and use your tags.  Will this change the way you tag your designs?  Maybe, some suggested it would, others didn’t seem to think it would be a big deal.  My opinion is mixed.  Unless I were able to sit around all day for a year and test the results of several different ways of doing things, I wouldn’t be able to tell.  However, wouldn’t tags that are good for the CafePress MarketPlace also be the same ones you would use to describe things for Google?  - my tagging activities aren’t really going to change, based on that theory.

Hope this helps you right off the start.  Any questions about tagging that I can answer?  I am going to try and do another test here shortly to see if lots of tags works better than few tags.  I will let you know the results.

Slippy
From Pink Slip