Amazon Tagging R.I.P.

[Richard]

Today, Amazon shut down user tags. I checked my own titles, and all the tags are gone. While it is true that abuse (if that is the word) was rampant, still I never wrote mine down -- I guess I'm an eejit -- so it will be a job to figure out what the most effective ones were that drove searches to my books. Amazon says that if you work your tag words into your book blurbs, you'll come up higher in the rankings than you did with only tags. I wonder what will come next? Whatever it is, I hope it stays around long enough for me to figure it out.

[Paul]

My tags are all still there, along with the facility to add more. Am I missing something here?

[Richard]

Wow. Are you in the UK? Refresh your browser and see if they come back. I'm really curious.

[Paul]

Intriguing. They were there when I posted my first reply and yesterday (even after refreshing the page) but today they are gone!

[Dinah]

My tags on the UK amazon sites were still up yesterday. I'm sorry to see the tags go in the US, as every bit helps readers find books, but I was never sure how useful tags were for "discoverability" compared to the mysterious algorithms. My beef is that ten years of "also bought"'s for my books in the UK aren't transferred over to help guide customers on the US site; my books look pretty naked on the amazon.com site as a result, though they have a sturdy "long tail' in England.