Tag Clouds - good or bad for SEO

[themistral]

Hi,

 

I am looking into tag clouds as they seem to be the new thing that everyone is using.

 

I have been reading articles on the web and I am getting conflicting reports.

Some are saying that they are good for SEO, and some say you are penalised for using them.

 

Does anyone have any reliable information source on this?

[dsaba]

who cares..

don't sacrifice good features for supposed SEO ranking

if its good they will come...

[themistral]

I am doing a web site that I think a tag cloud would be good for - it can be used to visually show the categories with the most content.

But the client is very seo minded so I don't want to harm seo.

 

How do search engines know that tag clouds are different from keyword stuffing?

[tibberous]

I don't think they do. That is why people have mixed results with it, just like with keyword stuffing.

 

If you are mod rewriting the URL's, have all your word cloud URL's go to a URL like site.com/tag/tag name/ and then put:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /tag/

 

In a file called robots.txt in the root directory of your server. Otherwise, your site is going to seem to have tons and tons of seemingly redundant index pages. The SE might even quite spidering you if it takes too long.

[wolfrat]

I'm personally not a big fan of tag clouds, I think they have very little value, and don't add much to the user's browsing experience. It's a waste of space.