Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
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I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article.
I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that.
Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive.
I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
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I was also noticing that tag clouds are doing better in SERPS than articles. This is surprising to me because before I was forced to take a leave of absence from the online word 7 years ago, it seemed like an original article with the term in the title would do better than a tag cloud. Even if the tag cloud had links to more articles about the same topic on the site.
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