Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Amazon Tags. Farewell?

Happy Tuesday, good people of the blogosphere! One day closer to Friday, we are! Ooooooh that sounded rather Yoda-ish, no? Today, I'd like to bring something to your attention that you might have missed.

Amazon has, apparently, done away with the tagging system on their website. I hadn't been able to tag anything for a while and was beginning to wonder if it was some sort of Amazonian conspiracy against me. Yesterday, as I'm browsing through recent news on Facebook, I see a status update where someone says the tags are gone from Amazon. Lookie!
I am simultaneously filled with glee and remorse. Glee because I finally saw it wasn't just me with the problem; remorse because they've taken away one of the ways we can boost our book in searches. For Indie authors, the tags were a portal into getting our new stuff in front of people searching for what we write. It's like a huge slap on the wrist. Right? Maybe...

What did we do wrong?

Maybe it wasn't us. Perhaps it was just a system that wasn't working the way Amazon intended. Of course, it could have been us. We'll never know. Maybe the tagging system went away because we embed tags in our books' descriptions when we upload them/make them available for purchase.

In the big bad world of Indie publishing, maybe this isn't such a terrible thing. Let's look at it from another angle, shall we? Say they do away with the like system as well:

If Stephen King's books have 5,000 likes and 40,000 tags with every word known to the English language on them, they're going to be more visible to people performing searches (more words mean more hits) and rank higher in the returns (more likes and you show up first). If all those likes and tags are gone, Mr. King's publishing company gets to choose up to seven descriptive tag words; just like the rest of us. He no longer hits first on a search because of his number of likes. Oh man, he's been forced into the ditches with the rest of us; struggling for air, grasping at mud, and sliding back down now and then because he loses his grip.

So is the loss of the tagging system really that big of a deal? I know if I've purchased the work of an author and they release a new book, I get an e-mail without ever having clicked the like button. So if they take that away as well, I'm in the running... maybe! Is Amazon trying to find a way to even the playing field?

We may never know.

What are your thoughts?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

4 comments:

  1. I didn't know the tagging system was gone, thanks for the update! I had heard of some abuse with the system, so maybe that's why. Very curious

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is kinda weird, huh? But maybe it'll give us a better shot at being seen, eh? Misuse of tags is something I could see as a HUGE problem. Thanks for the comment, Heather! :)

      Delete
  2. Checked today and now the Likes are gone too! Very curious on what's going on

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yup, only a matter of time, it seems... I'm sorry, but I applaud their actions on a system that was defunct. haha!

      Delete

Play nice and have fun. If you're a jerk, I won't publish your comment. My blog. My rules. Thanks for taking the time to chat at me!

Comments have been temporarily disabled due to the astronomical amount of spam I've been dealing with. Sorry!

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
https://jomichaels.blogspot.com/2013/02/amazon-tags-farewell.html
jomichaels.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
109635
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:WTWUYGNQ2LPWKOM43XD4AHUKQTZPXJOQ
<urn:uuid:bf6ef509-f87d-46eb-9707-2f3744b142bb>
2018-06-24T03:36:30Z
172.217.7.161
text/html
sha1:HZSQERDSOWRAPU7AZOVBXBEPNSEMYY5I
<urn:uuid:38a41839-2542-4652-89de-640b641bef6c>
https://jomichaels.blogspot.com/2013/02/amazon-tags-farewell.html
response
<urn:uuid:3264829c-0279-4c5f-b8ff-df3cc769ad86>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-30-196-115.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf