Do Tag Clouds Help or Hinder SEO?

Introduction

In this how to video Matt Cutts from Google, answers the question, “Do tag clouds help or hinder SEO, or do they have no effect?”

What is a Tag Cloud?

The first thing to think about when considering the potential problem is, ‘What is a tag cloud’?

A typical blog might have a tag cloud in the sidebar which consists of a whole bunch of different tags that have been used to mark the difference blog posts. The size of the link show in the cloud being a representation of the links popularity.

So what is a tag cloud? Well, really it’s just a list of links and like any list of links it can be overdone. If you have 500 tags (links) in your tag cloud, that can look a little bit like keyword stuffing. The potential for looking like keyword stuffing is especially prevalent because it’s a completely arbitrary list of words jumbled together.

Tag Clouds Good or Bad for Your Site?

So, the way to think of a tag cloud is as a list of links. So tag clouds can be good or bad for your site depending upon the implementation. If you overdo it and it looks like keyword stuffing, then Google will not trust those links and that could impact on your ranking. If it is just small number of tags, then it probably won’t have an impact in terms of hurting your ranking but it is still a number of links on your page and page rank will flow out through them.

• Should you require SEO related keyword tools tools, then you will find my article, “SEO Tools for Keyword Research” useful.

Well, I hope you found something useful and enjoyed this article, do tag clouds help or hinder SEO.