Etsy Sellers Must Comply with New Tagging Rules Thanks to New Search

Etsy sellers must make sure they understand the details of new tagging rules that are part of a new policy instituted by the online marketplace on Thursday. Etsy said it made the change after hearing sellers' concerns about its new relevancy search, which changed the default sort order on searches from recency to relevancy.

As a result of the concerns it heard from sellers, Etsy revised its "DOs and DON'Ts" policy in a section called Labeling your items. The policy updated rules as they pertain to information that helps shoppers find items, such as tags, titles, categories, attributes and materials.

For example, sellers should not use several variations of a term in a single tag, such as "gray grey" or "knit knitting knitted" - Etsy would consider that to be tag stuffing. But phrases such as "silver earrings," "knit hat" and "leather journal" are acceptable multi-word tags if they are relevant and accurately describe the item.

Etsy wrote in an announcement to sellers on Thursday:

"As we've communicated in the Forums, improving the search experience on Etsy is a top priority and will be an ongoing process, evolving over time. Our site policy may also need to evolve, to complement how the site works. Over the past week, we have revisited our policy to make sure that it aligns with Etsy search sorted by relevancy, and we've made some revisions."