Why Creating Tag Clouds May Be Harmful To SEO

I guess you can take tag clouds either way, good or bad. I’ve used them on a few sites, but took them off because they had too many selections on them. I use a lot of tags on most pages of my sites and several sites have many hundreds of pages. In such a case it is too much to display all the tags.

Also I use a lot of phrases as my tags for longtail SEO purposes and many would not be good for a person looking for a general topic or category. Overall I refrain from using tag clouds but use tags a lot on my sites.

Its a good thing you have thick skin Richard so thank you for allowing the comments through. I apologize lumping you in with the other monkey see monkey do lemmings as you did clearly state “You can decide for yourself after watching Matt’s video if cloud tags are a good or bad idea. Personally, my take away from the video is, the smaller the cloud tag the better.”

That said, you have apparently fallen for the smaller the cloud the better bull-schtick. As it pertains to –our– interests its not quantity of links but quality of links that is most pertinent to word clouds.

A site with an extraordinarily large number of linked tags in a word cloud displayed on a page could simply be and usually is the result of frequent and prolific blogging with conscientious tagging of keywords chosen to establish the context of the article which has been blogged. Speaking in terms of computational linguistics we hear the results of this process described as semantics.

It is stunning to listen to this weasel Matt Cutts try to claim fewer links in a word cloud improve page rank when parsing the links is automated and tens of thousands of links can be processed in microseconds. People tend to avoid thinking about the facts that Google has data centers that literally contain thousands of servers that do nothing but these parsing tasks. There is another agenda which I will briefly explain.

As I stated Google is attempting to compel us to avoid the use of our own taxonomies, our own semantics and most importantly –our– own quantifiable results in –our– own best interest to –our– readers and –our– advertisers on –our– pages. In other words, Google is attempting to persuade you and I to stop calling a cow a cow without their approval and is now going as far as to threaten to penalize all who fail to comply. Ever read the book Animal Farm? Same thing going on here.

This becomes obvious when the nefarious liar Matt Cutts speciously claims word cloud tags are “arbitrary” when in fact choosing the words and terms to compose a tag is usually done carefully and thoughtfully by a person choosing which words and terms serve his or her best interests to describe the context of the article they blogged that the person believes will assist others to find the article when searching the web. Nothing arbitrary about that unless you are an insidious weasel with a hidden agenda.

Well Richard, we know what the hidden agenda is. As I presume you likely know Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been colluding with one another in an attempt to force us to adopt their own taxonomy documented at schema.org. They are failing at that endeavor so pop goes the weasel to threaten everybody instead of really getting to the facts of the matter.

I’ve never seen the point in tag clouds anyway.

They don’t look particularly good and there are far better things to put in the sidebar of your Blog like email sign up boxes, links to other blog posts or embed social media sites.