As some of you might have noticed, I've put up a tag cloud on the homepage of this blog. The reason for that is that when checking my analytics, I was finding that my older posts were getting lower amounts of traffic. Now that wasn't really a problem with the first posts I wrote, as those weren't so interesting anyway, but at the pace I'm putting out content these days I need a system that works a bit better to keep stuff indexed.
I used the simple tags plugin to tag all posts in my blog (yes that took a while), and threw up the widget with the tag cloud. I did modify the plugin a bit to make sure the tag cloud only shows up on the front page. As you might have noticed, I have not gotten rid of the category structure. I don't know if I will. I'll see what this tag cloud does for my indexation, and whether I will be getting more search engine traffic.
Some of you will think that this creates dupe content, and indeed it does, as I'll tag this post SEO, WordPress, and I'll put it in both of these categories too... Have I found a solution for that yet? Nope. Thinking about it though :)
I'll report back in a few weeks!
Just had a quick look, and on the SEO and Wordpress tag pages, they were the same excerpt rather than the article as well, so I think the dupe content is quite small, and from what I have seen in the past is unlikely to cause problems... But it will be interesting to see what you actually find!
I've found that my users really enjoy using the tags to navigate. I used to have the tag pages show all of the posts in their entirety, and I realized that I could increase pageviews and make them more manageable by using excerpts (my excerpts are a paragraph or two though). I have excluded all my tag pages from being indexed though. I first did that when I had the full content on them, but now I'm continuing to do that because I'm still scared of the dupe content issues like you said. I'd love to see what kind of solution you cook up.
Funny, the same day I decided to put my tags in a tag cloud as well at Webhypes.
I placed them in the header, have seen that before on other blogs and I think it looks nice. People will notice and I've received the first positive reactions already!
You're tag cloud is looking real nice Joost, keep up the good work!
I think the All-in-One SEO pack plugin lets you choose whether you want to index the tags/categories/dates (separately) or not.
This might be a solution :)
Great solutions Lucas! It does allow you to set the categories (and archives) to noindex and therefor you've solved this 'problem'. Thanks!
What about some kind of sitemap page with a simple list of all the posts in your blog?
http://www.internetwealthmaster.com/really-simple-sitemap/ does the work
@Anup: yeah I know, we'll see :)
@Willy: hmm interesting, that would vote for putting the tag cloud on all pages and just nofollowing it on subpages...
@Lucas & Coen: yeah I can do with my robots meta plugin too (dev version). I DO want them indexed though.
@Ani: yes, I've been thinking about that too :) Will do that after this experiment though, so they don't interfere.
I've been thinking about this for sometime too. Its a tough call though. Personally I think Willy's idea is the best, just to show exerpts, or perhpas even just a list of post titles. I am not convinved though that the tags will add traffic. I am very interested to see if they do though. I'd actually be interested to hear what Matt Cutts has to say on this specifically becuase navigation and tagging are really two different issues.
Oh, sorry I just wanted to test my new Gravatar :) Hope you don't mind. Sorry Joost ;)
Hehe no problem Allan, it looks good :)
Joost flatten your archives a little more with this plugin
I know you have them partially flattened with the 1 2 3 4 5 6 navigation, but that only passes on some of the juice, and no relevance.
That plugin doesn't achieve everything I need, thus I had no problems with someone taking over what I had already taken over myself.
The biggest problem with duplicate content pages isn't that they have duplicate content, but that they leak if you have sitewide blogroll links, or full content with links.
Another problem can be when you create a tag and only use it once.
The advantages of tags?
1. More titles for the same content
2. More pages in the index
3. Passing relevance
4. more internal linking if you have a lot of external links on a page
That being said I have seen a reduction in indexing of my tag pages over the last 4 months, but I cannot decide if that was due to a change in Google, or something to do with the PR penalty.
Google might not officially have a supplemental index any more, but some tag pages can end up in whatever they now call what doesn't exist, even if they have some juice.
I also haven't been using CQS for a few months though on the tag pages I don't think that was a factor.
Regarding duplicate content, I've opted for the solution to select a given tag as primary, and then to write a no-index meta tag to other occurences. How effective do you think this is?
I personally hate tag clouds, I think they look hideous and I've never seen them increase traffic enough to make it worth whiled.
If it purely from a SEO perspective, you'd get better value placing the cloud below the categories section.
Also, I think a better solution is to use the 'related posts' plug in, it gives users a semi CTA (call to action) - will increase internal indexing and helps clump posts together.
Let me know how your search traffic goes though, if you work out a neat way of avoiding the dupe content issues I might be swayed.
Why not just block /tag/ in robots.txt file? I have found that to work wonders.
The thing is though... I WANT them indexed.
Yeah, I caught that AFTER I posted, :(
Outside of that, I'm suprised that you're allowing the categories to be indexed, as well. How about getting rid of tags and putting in an archive?
I've been using the following tag/category strategy and wondered what do you think:
Leave all tag and category directories open for crawling, and use tags/categories as a way to push link equity to your best posts. If you have an average post, only use a single tag. If you have a post that you're really excited about, use 2 or 3 tags/categories. That will ensure that your best posts receive the most internal link equity. Other bloggers use fluff posts that link back to older posts to achieve the same effect. I think this is especially effective for new blogs that don't have much link equity to being with. Thoughts?
As Maria says, tags should be useful for users, it adds value as it is another way to categorize texts so google & cia quite sure pay atention to them knowing that in a blog it may cause some "reasonable" duplicated content.
I guess google knows easy if your site is a blog while using worpress, blogspot or any other well recogniced cms but in my case I use my own to blog so I don't know how good can be Mr.Google recognizing wich type of site is crawling and taking in cosideration its particularities.
this is why I don't use tags
I think we're all facing the problem of loosing traffic to out older posts. What I have thought of doing is use the SH-autolink plugin and create two or three word sentences that links back to each post I make.
Over time that will surely create links from new posts back to older posts. The only concern I have is that future posts might get filled with links to older posts. But I guess that will take many years but it will be the ultimate result.
The more I think about this, the more I hope your experiment ends up successful. I can't wait to hear your results. I think having indexed tag pages (as long as there is no dupe content penalty) will be extremely effective at picking up long tail searches in comparison to single pages. I know you have relatively short excerpts. I'd imagine that the shorter your excerpts are, the less likely you are to see a duplicate content penalty. Do you think there might be a critical point where your excerpts would be too long?
I'm an ignoramus when it comes to these matters, but it strikes me there is certainly something else going on, even if it's not the supplementary index. Some of my posts are indexed and others aren't... I can't see much rhyme or reason for it.
So what was the follow up to this test?
any more info on this post. About to run my whole site on wordpress and cannot decide whether to use tag clouds...there is very few decent post about the pros and cons.