Do Tag Pages Benefit Your SEO Strategies

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 26 of September , 2008 at 11:19 am

SearchEngineRoundtable posted an article related to Tag Cloud pages and the way Google treats them. This follows a Google Groups thread on the subject. The issues raises certain questions including that related to Googles dislike of indexing ’search result’ pages.

Is a tag cloud a ’search result’ page is one of the first questions to be asked. It is probably a line ball call, however, Google does seem to be indexing and ranking these tag cloud pages so they are probably not considered ’search results’ pages at present - the future, who knows.

I don’t know if these pages actually offer any benefit to a user. I would certainly prefer a user to land on a page that was more relevant to their needs than a simple tag cloud. From an SEO perspective, perhaps a noindex tag could be considered.

My second question relates to internal links. Google have often stated that any more than 100 links from a page leaves that page questionable. It certainly heavily dilutes any possible link juice if the page is indexed and ranked. Larger sites can have over 1000 pages and a tag cloud could link to those pages using more than one tag - that is a lot of links leaving the one page.

For blog users, particularly those using WordPress, a sitemap generator may serve a more useful purpose for the user, and to prevent any search engine optimization pain, each page of a sitemap can have a limited number of links.

A tag cloud page may look good, however it does nothing for the visitor, except perhaps confuse them; they enter a search term expecting results only to land on a page of tags, it doesn’t look good from a business perspective. Tag clouds could almost fit into the gimmick class, their benefit is minimal if at all, so unless you really know what you are doing, there are far more important SEO and content related task that doing first.

                      Category: SEO                      

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