3 replies to this topic

[dzinerbear]

I wondering about blog tags that we put at the bottom of posts. My theme has an option to make them not indexable. Should I be doing this? They seem to be bringing in good amounts of traffic.

Some people say this creates duplicate content issues, others say it doesn't

I'm confused.

[Michael Martinez]

I wondering about blog tags that we put at the bottom of posts. My theme has an option to make them not indexable. Should I be doing this? They seem to be bringing in good amounts of traffic.

Some people say this creates duplicate content issues, others say it doesn't

I'm confused.

The "tags create duplicate content" camp is living in lalaland.

However, Matt Cutts did say in a recent Google Webmaster video that tag clouds can become large enough that they look like you're stuffing the page with keywords, and that can confuse Google's algorithm (or maybe they just don't like tag clouds at Google).

I think if you're just tagging posts uniquely and not displaying a tag cloud, you're probably okay. You should only publish summaries on any tag or category pages anyway, and you should NOT be using tags that are the same as any categories (and vice versa).

[Jill]

The "tags create duplicate content" camp is living in lalaland.

Huh? They totally create duplicate content. The only reason big sites like HuffPo use them is to have the keywords on the page.

I would go with the nofollow on them if you feel the need them. Either that or only use a small number of tags, in general.

[Michael Martinez]

Huh? They totally create duplicate content.

In order for a tag page to create duplicate content it must:

• Publish the full text of a post
• Include all the posts from another tag
• Include all the posts from a category

Otherwise, it's not creating duplicate content.

If the tag page is just including summaries of posts and the posts are tagged differently from the way they are categorized, then the tag page is fine. NoFollowing tag pages throws PageRank away and there is no compelling reason to do that.

ON EDIT: Let me add that I don't, as a rule, use tag pages. I find them to be a real inconvenience as I have to keep asking myself, "Have I populated this tag with new content lately? Do I have duplicate tags?"

Duplicate tags are a real pain. I have a couple of blogs where I have invested time in tags and they are a nightmare to manage. So just from a publisher's perspective -- no SEO intuition involved at all -- I tend to avoid using tags.

Edited by Michael Martinez, 31 March 2011 - 12:35 PM.