Indexing tag pages or not?

I’ve been playing with the subject of indexing tag pages in Wordpress for quite a while now. I have sites were i keep these pages in the indexes and pages where i don’t . The result vary from case to case though, so stating a rule for this subject is kind of difficult.

You might ask why am I even bothering with this problem. Well, let’s see why Tag pages are not worthwhile of being indexed:

• they are just another navigation method on your site, meant to help visitors find posts on the subject they’re interested of.
• they won’t rank. Unless you’re an authority, they won’t. I believe SE have some kind of trigger to distinguish and declassify tag pages, and this is especially true foo Google.com . On regional though, clever done tag pages might rank well.
• they create duplicate content: a tag page is usually similar to the category page so you have the same content as in categories, just displayed in a somewhat different order
• they create almost empty pages, unless you have a very tight tagging system. And this will happen every time you’ll use a new tag that hasn’t been used before on your site.
• sometimes, they create useless pages

And we could continue with that. But that doesn’t mean tag pages can’t be useful for ranking, if done correctly. First of all, you should have a standardized tagging system. You should only use nouns on singular form, without any articles, etc.

ex: use only "mobile phone" to tag all the articles about mobile phones, and don’t use others like: mobile phones, mobile, phone, telephone, etc .

You should also try using complex tags made from groups of words instead of singular words. And you should use tags that have a potential to help your visitors and be searched on SE.

ex: a tag like "pictures of Britney Spears" used on all the articles with Britney Spears will do better and be more useful than just "Britney Spears"

Also, try not to have singular tags (tags only attached to one or two posts on your site), cause these will generate almost empty pages.

Lots of other tiny advices could be given here… So, as you can see, tagging is not that simple in you want to get traffic from search engines on these tag pages. Actually, it’s quite difficult. And even if done right, most of the time you will only rank on long tail searches with almost no competition. Or you won’t rank at all…

That’s why i choose to not index tag pages on my .com blogs. I can’t say this vastly improves my ranking positions (although slight increases were spoted 2-3 months after no-indexing these pages), but at least i keep a tight control on the pages indexed. Anyway, if you have a site with 1000 posts and 5000 tags, no-indexing these tag pages will surely help your posts rank better. Like in this guys case: traffic increase by 300% after no-indexing tag pages .

In the end, i can’t draw a clear conclusion, but I’ll have to say no-indexing Tag pages is the good thing to do in most cases. Oh, and if you don’t know how, the easiest way is to add the following line to your robots.txt file :

Disallow: /tag/ 

This should work on any default Wordpress blog. If your tag pages have a different indicator (like /tags or something), just use that one instead.

Tags: noindex