Hi Dper's, I run a mobile/technology related blog. I am from commerce back ground and therefore have virtually no knowledge of SEO. I have been running the blog for more than a year now. During the initial months of blogging, i used 5-6 tags (in wordpress self-hosted) and the traffic was not much (150 uv's each day). I also used All-In-One SEO plugin for wordpress (with same tags/keywords). However, recently i tried to experiment with tags and started putting more tags to the posts (around 20-30) and the traffic almost doubled). I used more of 2 word, 3 word tags (or keywords). Moreover, a good number of blogposts are also appearing on 1st, 2nd and 3rd pages of google for certain keywords. Though, am happy with the results and increase in traffic but am concerned that google may ban my blog for keyword stuffing (Read somewhere on some forum). Is it true that using 30+ tags/keywords results in banning by google ? Any help will be greatly appreciated. And thanks for reading
The numbers of using tags will not hurt your website but you have to use your own common sense when doing it. It would be the best if you put only tags the relevant to your post and not just bunch in trying to get ranked for every keywords. If you doing so, it would be looked like a spam attempt from Google perspective. Most of peoples which have a problem using tag are because they do not use them properly.
you can put lots, really lots. only bad thing is, it may bring lots of duplicate pages and increase your server loads.
Meta keyword are more likely being ignored by SE because of so much before abuse. Its good to hear if putting more keywords works fine for your site, but again don't abuse it. It maybe just like any other webmasters out there that figure out some loophole and abuse it, soon Google find it out and take some action like penalty or ban.
I am not using unrelated tags, just extending them. Like for a post about a wordpress application for nokia mobile, i used tags like mobile application for nokia; wordpress mobile applications, wordpress app for nokia, etc (And other such similar combinations). Is this correct ? I am not concerned about server load, the site is well optimized to handle traffic surge. As i mentioned the tags used by me above (in this reply), is this method an abuse ? And i am not a webmaster by profession and found this method by hit and trail manner. And thanks guys for your replies