Tags causing Duplicate page content?

[zapprabbit]

I was looking through the 'Duplicate Page Content' and Too Many On-Page Link' errors and they all seem to be linked to the 'Tags' on my blog pages. Is this really a problem and if so how should I be using tags properly to get the best SEO rewards?

[SlavaRybalka]

I use 2-3 tags. You can get without them at all - this don't prevent me to get high rankings.

[RustyF]

Tags and categories can cause duplicate content. If it causes a penalty or not, I don't know.

On smaller sites I've seen the same page listed in the top ten search results for some of my sites. I think this is exactly what Google doesn't want.. I love it but I think Google won't.

I use a plugin on my WP sites called Platinum SEO that allows me to mark tags and categories as noindex, follow. I'm not sure that's the right thing to do but i do it.

I started doing this after noticing i had a lot of duplicate titles "warnings" in Google Webmaster Tools.

Long ago, I read where a Google employee said that if your website has links to the same content Google would not penalize you. That is basically what a tag or category is. Being paranoid though and seeing the duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools, I started dong that just to be safe.

I had a digital camera site take a beating on Google this month. It is slowly coming back up. I had noticed I had more than one result on page one in several cases before I got the smack down.  I had failed to setup my categories and tags as no index in the plugin mentioned above. I have no idea if that caused the spanking Google gave me. The articles were 80% original but i had pulled some content from Amazon without re-writing it so that might have caused it.. I really don't know. Its a fairly new site and I've seen that before so it might just be the Google dance.  Rankings are now improving I went to number one to number 53.  Back at 15 now.

[JaredBroker]

Tags carry no SEO value.  All they do is notify your competition the exact keyword phrases that you are targeting.  Matt Cutts has suggested many times that categories alone are a best practice.

Have a good one,

Jared