Are post tags on blogs still useful?

[mozUser1469236629285]

Hello

I have a number of sites on Wordpress which all still use the post tag feature. Is this something that I should really be avoiding due to duplicate content issues in the url's of the site, or is it still something that can help SEO wise?

I only ask as I did a crawl diagnostics report on SEOmoz and it found that 48 of my title elements were too short due to these tags in the URL's.

If you do all suggest I keep using them, should they be 3 odd words which are keywords?

Thanks in advance.

[DanDeceuster]

Tags never were useful for SEO and are not now. They are strictly a usability feature. If you use categories then tags are certainly obsolete. If you use the all in one seo pack you can noindex your tag pages I believe, so I would do this to avoid duplicate issues. Also block the /tag/ directory in your robots.txt file.

[TaitLarson]

I run a wedding blog.  A few of our categories rank highly in google.  None of our tags do.  Of course to Google tags and categories are essentially the same thing.

There are some simple WordPress plugins that allow you to noindex or nofollow your tags if you decide you're worried about duplicate content or want to do some page rank scuplting.  I recommend the All In One SEO Pack.

[mozUser1469236629285]

Thanks for your help guys. One more question.....on the crawl diagnostics report mentioned above, there are 48 meta descriptions missing which are all on tag url's. Is this a probem or can a search engine distinquish between a tag and a real post?

[mozUser1469236629285]

Hi Daniel,

Regarding blocking the tag directory in the robots.txt file, I did some searching about on SEOmoz and I found this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions    where she says that

The best way to use a robots.txt file is to not use it at all. Well... almost. Use it to indicate that robots have full access to all files on your website and to direct robots to your sitemap.xml file. That’s it.

Would you agree with this or do you still think that blocking the tags would help? What you are saying makes sense to me but I just wanted to double check with you before I did it!

Many thanks

[TaitLarson]

Search engines can't really tell the difference between types of pages.

Do you want your tag pages to rank in search results?  If so you could add a description.  The All In One SEO plugin I mentioned could help with this.  However, as I alluded to before, it's tough to get lots of tag pages to rank well in google.  I wouldn't worry too much about adding meta descriptions for them.

[TaitLarson]

One quick aside: categories in WordPress are easier to SEO then tags.  Wordpress collects category descriptions.  Plugins like All In One SEO Pack can use this info to write a meta description for you.  Wordpress doens't collect descriptions for tags so plugins can' use this info to write out a meta description for your tag pages.