Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)

[Daniel_B]

If so how bad?

We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues.

We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all.

Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings.

Before I do, can you give me some advice around this?

Thanks,
Daniel.

[David_ODonnell]

If you're using tags internally to help organise content, you could just stop them from appearing on the front end of the site.

The alternative is to keep them on the front end, but to no-index the tag pages.

[FedeEinhorn]

Had the same issue myself, constant duplicate content reported on tag pages as sometimes some tag could have the same content on a page (while paginated).

We decided to no-index the tag pages, not only for the duplicate content issue, but also, they do not provide any extra to search engines, they are intended for users, then why have search engines indexing them? We added a no-index but NOT a nofollow as we WANT the pages they link to to be indexed (posts).

Sure, we lost about 7K indexed pages, but now those that remain are actually then ones that deserve to be there.

I'm with David on this one.

[toddmumford]

Agree 100% with David and Fredrico. Noindex, follow your tag pages.

[Daniel_B]

Ok thanks guys, at this stage I think this is the way I'll go or as David says just use them to organise content and not display them.

Has anyone else found anything out there, articles, videos, anything on Moz that says Google is smart enough to deal with this so it is a non issue.

Also any thoughts on how important blog tags are these days for usability?

[David_ODonnell]

I don't think standard tags get used much by visitors. Related posts, especially if acompanied by thumbnail images, perform much better in my experience.

[Daniel_B]

Thanks David, at this stage I have set up site to no index follow tag pages. Thanks for blog usability feedback. Related posts is next on the list of to do for the blog.