It helps me a lot. Many of my tag pages alone have been indexed by google, but I have since chosen not to index those pages so as not to have dupe content, but I keep hearing back and forth about it so may consider not doing that. Still, it has done only good, never harm.
If using tags creates duplicate content, does the reward for using tags outweigh the penalty for dupe content? If so, using tags would be better than not. Does anyone get penalties for using dupe content that they know of?
My blog gains good backlinks through tags. Technorati and Mybloglog gives you backlink for each tag you are using.
I agree with you. Tags does not improve SEO a word of advice, you should have no follow , no index settings for tags, categories. search engines will view these pages as duplicate pages. the tags & categories link will also leak link juice take a look at techcrunch & nytimes. both site use wordpress. they dont have tags & categories. tags & categories are good for user browsing but bad for SEO. again, look at techcrunch and nytimes to see for yourself. no tags, no categories on each post
If duplicate content is the only reason you are not suggesting tags, then I don't think that's a very good reason not to implement them. Google is smart enough to know what is the most important page on your site, and does a good job of ranking the correct page. Although I don't use tags for my blog at the moment, I am thinking about it. If you can create more relevance and build a better internal link structure with tags, then why not? It would also help users browse the site. Has anyone added tags to an older blog and noticed a positive or negative impact on se traffic? I'm still undecided and could do with some convincing myself