Yahoo just recently announced their support for the common tag which is a new semantic tagging format. The common tag was created to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging. There were several companies involved in the creation of the common which includes Yahoo, Zemanta, AdaptiveBlue, DERI, Faviki, Freebase and Zigtag.

The new common tag works like a meta keyword tag, but better. The common tag looks at content based on a related concept of subject instead of a specific keyword. This common tag is supposed to make web content more discoverable according to Yahoo. The end goal is to help search engines serve up the most relevant results based on what searchers are searching for.

The common tag is not only useful for identifying concepts within the content on your site, but it is also useful for identifying and referencing content elsewhere on the web on external content. This could come in handy for sites that also have social profiles and properties that focus around their general subject matter.

It remains to be seen if the common tag will be adopted by a large amount of people. This is what would be required in order for this tag to be a worthwhile method across the web.

For more information on the common tag, visit the common tag blog or check out the Search Engine Land blog post on this. And as always, check back with Search Perspective on any future updates on the common tag.