SEO : Avoid Tag clouds to prevent Keyword Stuffing says Matt Cutts

Today, we see many bloggers coming up; building blogs either using blogger or Wordpress. They work pretty hard, achieve results. After all the efforts made by them for a period of 3-4 months they see average rankings and start comparing with the best in the blogosphere. They often feel read the history of great bloggers who got success & say that we too put our full efforts on optimizing it. So, where does the difference lie ?

There is certainly a difference. A professional blogger too puts in equal efforts as compared to a startup blogger. But the difference between both is that the former one (Pro Blogger) performs smart work & optimizes the blog the right way. Taking tips from experts in the company, doing a bit of research himself is considered as a smart work. So, he achieves good results & makes money comfortably while the latter (Startup blogger) just toils and feels disappointed.

<Image Credit>

What is Keyword Stuffing ?

Keyword Stuffing, basically involves a collection of lot of words (normally meta keywords) from a site put in together. Look at the letters jumbled above in the image. Do you like it ? Well, if you are good in designing then you will surely as it looks attractive. But in pure English, do you have any idea what does letters are pointing to ? No, will be the obvious choice. Same is the case for search engines, even though they are bots; they tend to be human made. Keyword Stuffing will make the search engines consider the links as spam/less trusted links.

Why you should consider removing Tag clouds ?

Many people use Tag Clouds on their blogs, forums, etc. It’s good for your readers to get the info they want on a particular topic. But it’s not good for your search rankings; if you use lots of tags in the tag cloud it’s ultimately considered Keyword Stuffing.

I would suggest you to limit the number of tag clouds or if you feel your readers aren’t using it more often, then you can even consider removing it. Search Engines determine rankings of a site considering all the content, links & many other aspects. So every single link is important. Now, if a tag cloud too comes into play, the rankings of the site will be shared by it too.

Matt Cutts, who is considered as the SEO guru & who continues to work in Google’s Quality search & Webspam team has put out an answer to a Question asked to the Google Webmaster Team on YouTube. Watch the video as he has explained the same which I have written in this post.

I would recommend you to still use Tag clouds, but limit up to 25-30 tags on sites which don’t have main subjects to have concerns. On a blog or a forum, consider removing the tag clouds, or you can easily no-follow it as you have your main blog content i.e. your Posts which have higher priority than the Tag clouds. This will help the Page Rank (PR) to have a better priority on your blog posts.

Do you agree with the point made here ? Have you still kept the tag cloud on your sites ? Share your views as comments!

Tagged as: blog, blogger, keyword stuffing, search engines, tag clouds