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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

Hi Kevin

Thanks - yes, although I am a Moz Associate, out of full transparency I agree with that you are saying. It is not a tool I specifically use with Moz, and do prefer Screaming Frog for the exact functions you are referring to. Screaming Frog will tell you what pages the bad links are on.

You can definitely pass this on to the product team as a feature request on this page. Personally I love tools like their analytics, keyword difficulty, rank tracker, open site explorer, but I agree from this aspect the crawler is not the strongest, and I would suggest supplementing with Screaming Frog (as I do).

-Dan

Yes when you set up a campaign with Moz Analytics, Moz will crawl your website and return a whole report of suggestions. It will start a sample crawl which gets returned to you pretty quickly, and a full crawl a little bit thereafter. It will report things to you like 400 errors etc.

You can also use the Moz Crawl Test (PRO only as well) which will return to you the HTTP status code of each URL crawled.

Optionally, you can also use Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 pages to crawl, paid for bigger sites).

-Dan

Thanks for posting this Shaun! People actually do come back and read these months to come and these Q&A's will return in search results, so you've made this a really valuable page for future readers - thanks!

-Dan

Hi There - all superb answers so far - thanks guys! Can you give an example of any of your keywords? I have seen some long tail keywords be ultra high competitive, and others not. I have also seen some "long tail" with very low search volume but are only short 2-3 word phrases. There are transactional and information long tails. A little more specifics would help with some suggestions

Shaun

Great, thanks - happy to help!

-Dan