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@Velocio
Google does index them. Both separately and as part of a thread. It provides additional context to a thread, as well as providing virtual categories that many threads belong to.
The biggest advantage though is that tags can provide a search mechanism based on the content of threads without a keyword having to appear in the title or post of a thread.
The next biggest advantage is that you can permalink search results.
The offthepeg tag is a great example of both of those things: http://www.londonfgss.com/tags.php?tag=offthepeg
Tags aren't useful when it's all full of weird personal stuff... but so long as they don't number hundreds they shouldn't reach the tag cloud. The good noise should drown out the bad noise. So I'm quite happy for people to tag whatever they want providing that decent tags that reflect the content of a thread are being added.
And tags are not anonymous. vBulletin does store who tagged what thread and when. Aside from PM's (which will never be looked at or touched in any way by me ever) all other data on this site I'm quite up for surfacing in some way, I like transparency. So it may well be that when you view tag search results it says something like "tagged by VelocityBoy" or whatever. People should not think that tags are anonymous.