Folksonomies offer an easy method to organize information in the current Web. This fact and their collaborative features have derived in an extensive involvement in many Social Web projects. However they present important drawbacks regarding their limited exploring and searching capabilities, in contrast with other methods as taxonomies, thesauruses and ontologies. One of these drawbacks is an effect of its flexibility for tagging, producing frequently multiple syntactic variations of a same tag. In this paper we study the application of two classical pattern matching techniques, Levenshtein distance for the imperfect string matching and Hamming distance for the perfect string matching, to identify syntactic variations of tags.