Just when you think you’ve seen every SEO nonsense tactic, someone starts adding <happy> and <excited> tags to their content.
Let me be absolutely clear – these tags aren’t real. They don’t do anything. They’ve never done anything. It’s like trying to make your car go faster by painting racing stripes on it.
I’ve been watching “gurus” charge good money to teach people to add these meaningless tags because “AI search engines need help understanding emotion.” No, they bloody well don’t.
The emotion tag scam in action
Want to see what this rubbish actually looks like in practice? These “experts” are telling people to add code like this:
<h2>Our Amazing New Product</h2>
<excited>This revolutionary product will change your life!</excited>
<p>We understand your frustrations with the old solution.</p>
<empathy>We've been there too and know exactly how you feel.</empathy>
<p>Here's what our customers say:</p>
<happy>This product solved all my problems!</happy>
None of this is valid HTML. None of it does anything. You might as well be writing <unicorn> tags or <magic_seo_juice> for all the good it’ll do.
I’ve even seen “advanced” versions where they claim different emotional intensities matter:
<joy level="extreme">This is the best service ever!</joy>
<concern level="mild">You might be worried about the price.</concern>
Absolute nonsense, the lot of it.
Why this is complete bollocks
Modern search engines, whether traditional or AI-powered, are built on advanced natural language processing. They understand context, sentiment, and emotional tone from the actual words you use – not from made-up HTML tags that don’t exist in any specification.
Google’s been analysing emotional sentiment in content for years without needing special tags to guide them. They’re looking at:
- Word choice and phrasing
- Context and topic associations
- Natural language patterns
- User engagement signals
Adding fake tags won’t help – and could actively harm your site by creating invalid HTML that breaks your page structure.
How to convey emotion in your content
If you want to convey emotion in your content (which is a good thing!), try actually writing emotively – I know, I know, I’m just full of fantastic ideas!.
Use powerful language. Tell compelling stories. Write like a human talking to another human. That’s what connects with both readers and search engines.
Search engines don’t need you to label emotions with fake tags – they need you to create content that genuinely evokes those emotions in your readers.
Don’t fall for the hype
Anyone trying to sell you on “emotion markup” or “sentiment tags” is either woefully misinformed or deliberately scamming you. Either way, keep your wallet firmly in your pocket and your HTML clean.
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