: Wordpress Tag Cloud as link abuse Do Wordpress Tag cloud considered as link farm or duplicate content? How about categories? After many recent algo updates by Google, did Google created an algo

@Heady270

It isn't so much "link abuse" problem as a thin content problem and a PageRank dilution problem.

Tag and category pages...


often don't have much content, especially when a tag is only used on one or two posts.
are full of duplicate content. Everything that is on a tag page is also found on the post pages.
are usually poor landing pages. There is no way to "stick" the best posts to the top of a tag page. Content is always ordered by recency. Anybody visiting a tag page as their first experience on your site may feel the content is "random". A tag page isn't going to be anybody's choice for a "canonical" resource about a topic.
don't pass PageRank around the site well. A better choice is linking directly to "related posts" on the post page. Some related posts algorithms to use the tags for this purpose.


My recommendations for tag and category pages are:


Use noindex,follow in the robots meta tag. Search engines don't like to index them, but having them follow the links is fine.
Don't put tag clouds or category lists on every page on your site. They can be useful for users on the homepage, but they clutter up the site when used everywhere.
Use a related posts plugin for the post pages

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