Using tag clouds, is it helpful or harmful for SEO?
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Tag clouds for SEO

Tag clouds for SEO - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

A tag cloud is a bunch of tags placed together each of them marks a page or a category. So you should think of it as just a list of links. If there are too much links that wouldn’t be a useful thing and if they don’t it can be a little bit of work to make it function and if you used kinds like flash it could be harder to extract links from there. So you can use tag clouds but you should think on the technologies to use, on suitable keywords and pages that you’ll link to it.

 

Matt's answer:

Well, the thing to think about, first off, what is the tag cloud? Typically, you might have a blog or something like that, and then over here in the right-hand sidebar or over on the left sidebar you’ll see a whole bunch of different tags that have been used to mark the difference blog posts. And sometimes the tags are little bigger if they get more, if they been used more or sometimes a little smaller.

 

So what is a tag cloud? Well, typically that’s really just a list of links. Now, can tag clouds be overdone? Yes, they can. Certainly, if you have like 500 tags in your tag cloud that can look a little bit like keyword stuffing, especially because it’s completely arbitrary words all just sort of jumbled together. Also if you have a tag cloud that’s completely some weird sort of flash, you know, and they’re spinning all around. That can be really fun for users, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect that we can always extract those links and be able to flow a page rank through them.

 

But the way to think of a tag cloud is really, it’s a list of links. And so that can be good or it can be bad for your site. If you overdo it, for example, the keyword stuffing, then maybe we don’t trust those links as much.

 

It could impact the ranking of your page

If it is just small number of tags, then it probably won’t have an impact in terms of hurting your ranking or anything like that, but it is still a number of links on your page and page rank will flow out through them. So if you’d rather have page flow through your site, you might want to have your page rank flow into your individual blog post rather than have things tagged as SEO or things tagged as Google or whatever. So, if you’ll notice I have category pages on my blog.

 

I tend not to have tag clouds

They were very popular a while ago, but not that many users really seem to notice them or use them that heavily these days. It can be a little bit of work to set up, and then sometimes you are sending a massive amount of links to various parts of your site, and you’re not deliberately thinking at what are the parts of my site that I really want to send me page rank to.

 

For me personally I tend to lean a little bit away from using tag clouds. It’s not as if they usually cause any harm, although if you have a ton of them and they can hinder your efforts because it can show up a little bit almost as if it keyword stuffing. So, feel free to use them, but think about those sorts of factors whenever you’re deciding how big to make your tag clouds, what technologies to use, what tags to use, all those sorts of things.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: