Judy/Marty
When I got my "freebie eBay Phone Call" I asked the guy about metatagging. He said it is not spamming and in fact it helps with the spiders as they crawl looking for things to index. So the short answer is it's not illegal - according to "phone guy".

I tried it on a few auctions and then exported my CVS file to be picked up by the spiders. I looked at it and sure nuff there were far better keywords at the beginning as opposed to stuff just randomly picked up here and there.

Garry