Tag Clouds?

[EpicGlobalWeb]

To me, this seems kind of spammy in 2016 but can anyone confirm if this is a good practice still or not?

 

[SEOPub]

Spammy is not really the problem with it in my opinion.

My problem with tag clouds and why I think in most situations they are absolutely stupid to use is that they are weakening your links.

The more links that appear on a page, the weaker each link is. So if you toss something like that on every page, now you have an extra 20, 30, 40, or even more links which is making all your more important internal links much, much weaker.

Now if you run a massive, super-authority site, you can get away with bad SEO practices like that and still be fine. Amazon could run tag clouds all over the place, and it would not hurt them. However, for 99.999% of the websites out there, using a tag cloud would probably do more SEO harm than any good they might provide for user experience.

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

Thanks for clearing that up. I still see it a lot and that may be a good way to find some qualified SEO prospects.

 

[Rob Whisonant]

I have always seen them as a novelty that new webmasters seem to use still. It's kinda like adding a ton of animated gifs to your site. Distracting and not of any real use.

 

[wms]

View attachment 1766

To me, this seems kind of spammy in 2016 but can anyone confirm if this is a good practice still or not?

It is not spammy but vise versa, it is useful for your site in both cases SEO and your visitors.

For your visitors, they can find out everything easily with tags on your site, because they are group of relevant topics.

For SEO, it helps increasing pages for your sites if you know how to expand tag pages on your site, this can be done easily with some modifications if you are using Wordpress, and for sure, it helps SEO.

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

Interesting perspective. So you're saying that in the context of navigation (treating the tags like navigation elements)

 

[wms]

wms

No it looks like separated pages, exactly they are separated pages , I saw many websites did these and even their pages were ranked as well on search engine results, not only increasing number of pages. I didn't have opportunity to do for our forum.

Thus I suggested you to do some modifications on tag page. WordPress is easy to edit and we can do that for SEO benefits.

 

[robertcop1001]

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 wouldnt 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 dont trust those links as much.