Using tags when blogging for SEO

I'm interested to know for anyone who never made use of tags when blogging. When you started using them, did you notice it helped with SEO? I can see the advantages with having a tag cloud located in the blog sidebar, but unless you setup very targeted tags, you are linking to very generic keywords which wouldn't help much at all. How does the tag cloud work? It links to the most popular tags?

Opinions?

 

I did some blogging a while back but blogspot didn't have tags at the time. I was always rather disappointed about that. It's a good way to interlink related pages. You are basically building internal links with the tag keyword in the url.

 

Is there any way to automate the tag generation process? Have you noticed tag pages getting much traffic on their own?

 

does over tagging lower your serarch engine ranking??

 

i removed tag cloud from my own blog as there is a possible risk of duplicate content issue. if you use multiple tags for the same article, then same content would be showing under different pages of the same blog. i however use tags while writing and publishing articles on social media/web 2.0 sites

 

Duplicate content on your own domain doesn't cause issues. How many blogs publish full blog posts on the homepage and it's duplicated on category and archive pages. This doesn't effect traffic at all. Duplicate content usually refers to content on other domains.

 

it has always been a debate whether "onsite duplicate content" can get any penalty from google or not and some suggested that it could. google just recently canme up with "canonical URL" which would tell search engines which URL should be followed for content if the same site has multiple pages with same content. since tags can generate several pages of same content, as per google, it is suggested that you use "canonical URL" structure if you have tags on your site. in other words, tags by itself without canonical URL is not suggested.

for further reading

 

Your blog postings are already "tagged" so to speak with the Title, using a cloud just give them more tags and relates those tagged words to the page, this can be good or bad SEO depending on the relevance and amount of the tags

 

Exactly! And categories act as tags so to speak as well. Which is why I never made use of tags when they were made available. Hence this question.