My SEO specialist Jason today uncovered a sort of inefficiency in the way Flickr’s tags only search works. Maybe someone else has seen this first, but I’m giving him full credit until proven otherwise.
Try this fun little experiment: Find a picture that is tagged as “New York”, that is the whole phrase and not smooshed together like “NewYork” or separated like 2 tags “New” and “York”. Now search that user’s photostream for tags only and use “new york” as the query (but drop the quotes.) You’ll find that particular photo does not show. It will however, if you use the quotes or search for “newyork”. This is because Flickr’s tagging system considers a tag entered using quotes to make it a nice looking phrase as nothing more than a vanity display for the phrase squished together without the spaces.
As a result when a user searches a phrase without quotes they will only find your photo if it is tagged with the words individually and not grouped into a phrase. So if you want your picture to show for the search query of “new york” (again minus the quotes) then you would have to tag your photo as “new” and “york” separately.
