Are tag clouds helpful for your blogs? Does tag cloud enhance SEO or does it hinder? Or does tag clouds have no SEO effect on your blog at all? The answer to these questions is addressed in this short video by Matt Cutts. But first lets know who Matt Cutts is.
Matt Cutts is employed at Google for the Search Quality Group, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is one of the most well-known figures in the SEO Community for enforcing Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spams.
Matt has been working in Google as a software engineer since January 2000 and currently heads the Google Webspam Team.
In the following video, he explains the effects of using tag clouds – whether it enhances SEO or hinders or whether they have no effect at all.
I use both tags and categories to structure my blogs – WordPress generates pages for tags and pages do create page rank so if you have reasonable amount of tags and they get indexed it is good from SEO perspective.
Even I use tags and categories, but have disallowed crawling of my tags pages in my robots.txt. According to some, Google sometimes penalizes for duplicate contents if the tags pages are indexed.
You can use more tag to split your post into 2 parts – small one for archives (tags and categories) big one for posts, this way you don’t have your tags posts and categories all the same but still get the benefit of adding more PageRank by creating new pages.
Hi Dmitri,
I didn’t quite understand what you explained here. Adding a more tag for splitting long posts is fine, but what next?
By splitting your post in two parts using “more” tag you won’t/much less likely get penalized by having duplicate content on your site because your tags and categories will have only small portion of the post content while the full post will have full version. Also you it is better from usability stand point – instead of scrolling 10 screen to see all the posts on the archive page you can have all post to fit in one screen.
I used tag clouds but I limit the number of keyword in it. I think there is a negative effect if we put to much keywords on tag clouds.