Tag clouds between SEO & Spam

SEO,Tag clouds

[abedz]

Hello all,

I cant figure out a clear answer, which clarifies whether tag clouds are spam or not, especialy major blogging tools tag cloads which return a duplicated content of the orginal posts which its related to. ( here.. you have to think about the duplicated content penalty)

But... on the other hand.. using it will have a good impact on your search results (no one doubts that) !.

so, any ideas ?

[agerhart]

Tag clouds are not spam but I suppose it all depends on the presentation and delivery.

Many sites use tag clouds legitimately as a way for users to filter their content by popular user behavior.

[abedz]

ok i agree with you... but those legitimate people should use meta NOINDEX for thier tag clouds..

[agerhart]

And why should they do that?

[abedz]

Simply because it returns a page with duplicated content !

it might be confusing.. but yes the page has a different name.. please check out this :
[google.com...]
look at ----> Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

and thats what tag clouds is about... it creates multiple pages with substantially duplicated content.

So, what do you think of that ?

[agerhart]

For one, they probably would not be duplicate content because the tag page would have content specific to that tag and another tag page would have content specific to that page...so the content would be different than any other page on the site. Yes, the sub-content would be duplicated from another category page but the total page content would not be a duplicate.

I think that "out of the box" tag pages are somewhat low in value.

But if you're a little creative and customize them they could be content rich, useful pages.

I would also urge you to think twice before taking everything you read in Google's webmaster guidelines as gospel. Consider the source...they have their own motives.

[abedz]

Well...

Thanks alot.. am convinced right now :).