Are cloud tags good or bad

[cheekugames]

I was wondering if using cloud tags the kind we have on this forum helps in SEO or will it result in duplicate content and thus bad for SEO.

Regards
Cheeku

[RickyG]

Good question...dunno!

[Jason C]

personally I hate Tag Clouds, they are so ugly. As for it helping SEO, well it is more text on the site for google to read, if the tag cloud was filled with your keywords it may help some, but I wouldnt worry too much about it being duplicate content. I could be wrong though.

[Stephan]

I see many pages index in Google from my ATS site, the tag URL or link on the play game page, so I belief is good to have.

[cheekugames]

While we are still on the issue of SEO , what i have seen is that unless one is on the first page of google search for a particular keyword we won't get much traffic. what i am wondering is there are so many relative new sites that have gone to the first page in the first few months of launch , is it because they purchase high PR backlinks?? Other wise i do not see any other reason.. Sorry for being a little off topic.

[Geo3kant]

I do think it has SEO benifits because you tell the crawling spider look at these links, you create more 1 level deep links. You can get pages indexed faster i think.

Also you have more keywords on your index which could give you more hits from the search engine without even being charged of keyword spamming.

But, in my experions people don't use tag clouds to often so i got rid of them.

I think they are "alright" , i'm not a fan don't use them myself and my users didnt either, you should provide a good search option at your website and everybody is happy.

[gubugnet]

I like tag clouds or atleast tags. This is to an extent theoretical but I have seen guys do well with a simple iner linking strategy on a site. The thing is that you have to get the pages in the index before you can execute this and Tags are a good way to get lots of pages in the index.You can dump every page at the bottom ( just loooks bad to me ) and personally I have had a GREAT deal of success with a site outside of arcades that drops the last 20 searches on the footer. I was able to get 5000+ pages indexed and push a lot of them to the top of the SERPs

I dont think you get in trouble for Dupe content because quite some time ago I read a piece by the guy who owns games4work ( that arcade uses a grabber script to pull games ). He pointed out that his theory is Google looks at these short descriptions as editorial comments and I concur with that at this point. I tested with several games updated with the exact text and domains hosted on the same and different class C IP's and it does not seem to effect results until the text is 150 - 300 words or more from what I saw. As to users actually using tag clouds well from what I have seen on my sites not so much interests from users but they are SEO candy.

[kylekanwar]

I think you should use 3,4 tags any posy , as tags also index in search engine you can get traffic from that..

[palomavictoria]

Cloud tags are eye catching and they give visitors a nice look at what topics your blog about and also makes the more necessary topics stand out apparently. After all the more necessary a topic is, the larger the font size, this will benefited a visitor to your website to differentiate the niche your blog covers and what it doesn't cover or hardly what it simply glimpse over.

[smithseo]

I think nothing is bad in Cloud tags but we should use it in a very efficient manner.