Https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/ setting tag pages as blog corner stone article?

[AlirezaHamidian]

We do not have enough content rich page to target all of our keywords. Because of that My SEO guy wants to set some corner stone blog articles in order to rank them for certain key words on Google. He is asking me to use the following rule in our article writing(We have blog on our website):
For example in our articles when we use keyword "wolf", link them to the blog page:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/
It seems like a good idea because in the tag page there are lots of material with the Keyword "wolf" . But the problem is when I search for keyword "wolf" for example on the Google, some other blog pages are ranked higher than this tag page. But he tells me in long run it is a better strategy. Any idea on this?

[FedeEinhorn]

The idea of linking words to the tag page helps engines and people to find related content. However, it is always recommended to noindex tag pages, which means that search engines won't index that page, giving more exposure to the pages that really matter, the ones with the content.

[AlirezaHamidian]

Hi Fredrico,

Thanks for your reply. I could not fully get your point. My understanding is that if we make one article as corner stone, it will always have limited number of keyword and content while a tag page has way more related content.

What I get from your comment is that you prefer a single article rather than tag page to be targeted for a specific keyword. Am I right?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Most of the time, I default to recommending to NOT index tag pages. It's what I recommend in these two articles;

• http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/
• http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

BUT, with that said, I make these recommendations because people generally don't know what they're doing, and tag archives turn into a big mess. They can result in lots of thin/unhelpful pages, which do not help much when indexed.

I could see a point for using tags in this very specific intentional way. But you'd have to do it perfect;

• You can not over tag things.
• You need to make the tag archives look great
• They need to provide extra value above and beyond the post itself
• And you may want to to add customizations to them (like this plugin does for categories)

You have to recognize the other better options you are forgoing by using tags;

• You could create a page or post focused on the keyword
• You could create a category around that keyword
• You could manually assemble a page/post which is a resource that pulls all your posts together, much like a tag would do automatically, but this would be a unique piece of content hand curated.

[evolvingSEO]

That's pretty much what he's saying, because tag archives by design are not really useful pieces of content on their own. They are just lists of blog posts. It seems useful on the surface, but when you think about it, users don't want to search a search engine to then just have to search through another list of articles.

Plus people have tried using tags to rank for keywords a lot in the past, and I have seen far less tag archives ranking in Google over the last few years.

[AlirezaHamidian]

Thanks, I think I am better off make some corner stones out of some powerful articles rather than risking time and energy on the tag pages.