Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags.

Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial?

Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic...

Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.

[evolvingSEO]

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[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

For the most part, it is not a good idea to just use tags as a way to try and gain search traffic from them. They are possibly beneficial to users internal to your site. Users may read an article and want to read other similar articles, so having a few tags at the bottom of the post can be useful. Putting tags in your sidebar for navigation is rarely useful, but if done in a somewhat user friendly way it could work. I generally avoid "tag clouds" or having dozens of tag links in one spot.

In terms of the tag archives themselves (like mysite.com/blog/tag/tag-name/), tag archives rarely look different than posts themselves or other archives. Unless you have a giant site, with so many posts, and tags actually add a beneficial way to scroll through archives on a very specific topic, categories do this fine enough.

And for indexation - if it's a new site or a site that has NOT ever indexed tags I would advise to not index them moving forward either. Unless in a rare .5% of cases this is done in an extremely intentional and strategic way, not for SEO but for users and site architecture. (Think of a site like Smashing Magazine or Search Engine Land with LOTS of content, that's a rare edge case where using tags for navigation and architecture might make sense.)

If you HAVE indexed tags already I wrote an article on how to safely evaluate and noindex them.

In general, I would avoid tagging a post with more than 4-5 tags. Tags should always be different from categories (like more specific things).

-Dan

[DougRoberts]

So much depends on how you've implemented tags on your site and who your audience is.

It can be tempting to implement tags to try and make up for a broken categorisation and it's tempting to add tags to a page because they mention a topic rather than because it's actually relevant to that tag.

It worth taking a look at your analytics to see if (and how) your visitors are using your tag pages. I've see many sites where visitors just don't use the tags (there too many, they're meaning less, or even they are not obviously links!) and a lot of this depends on just how many tags your using, how meaningful these tags are to people and the relevance and quality of the articles you have associated with each tag.

Have you got internal search set up on your site and are you capturing the search data in your analytics? This can provide some great insights in what people are struggling to find on your site and what they expect to find. It can also highlight areas where your IA isn't working.

(As James mentioned) If your tag pages are indexed, and getting inbound search traffic then segment your non-paid search traffic and look at the bounce rate and other engagement metrics. How valuable is this traffic to you, and how relevant are they finding your tag pages as the answer to their query?

[JamesNorquay]

Also check how much traffic the tags are currently getting, one site I have looked at in the past had like 16k uv a month from some tags on the site so proceed with caution also I agree with the advice above as well.

[TomRayner]

Hey there

Dan Shure wrote this fantastic Wordpress optimisation guide here on the Moz blog a year or so ago and it is still very relevant for today.  In that post, he goes into depth about the problems with tags and what your best practice should be.  Usually, you want to noindex the tags on your WP site - keep them for navigation purposes if you want, but letting them be indexed can lead to duplicate content issues.