Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?

[JSOC]

I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Different people have different opinions on it.  As a general rule, I recommend clients not allow indexing of tag pages, just to be sure there's no duplicate content conflicts.  This is even more important when several tags are assigned to each article.  Quite often you'll end up with a "tag" page that's only got one or a couple articles, making for both duplicate content possibility and thin content pages.

The other potential problem for duplicate content issues is when articles show up in multiple tag pages.

[blackballonline]

Have you added Google Webmaster tools code and verified your site? This will give you fantastic insight into what is being crawled and if there are any dupe content problems present now.

Do you have an SEO plugin installed? Are canonicals set up? This would solve any problems for you if they exist.

***** OUR SCENARIO *****

We noindex pages, categories, and tags because we want our posts to rank on their own merit. We still assign categories and tags to posts for navigation internally but feel our posts stand on their own and are more of a benefit. Your experience and navigation may vary. We have never had a duplicate content problem yet and have operated our WP.org blog since before canonicals.

[hiddendepth]

I would block all tags until you create new content for each tag.

SInce it's wordpress you can create a tag php file and add content into it. Then you can add that tag to your sitemap and remove from robots.txt. That way you avoid duplicate content and boost the site with more seo friendly content.

You should create php files for each tag and just work on them one at a time.
For example you might start with tags-seo.php then tag-design.php and create specific content for those.

Example here

[JSOC]

Thanks everyone for the insights and for taking the time to help. I'm using the WP All in one SEO plugin and will continue to leave the tag pages set to noindex.