Is Tag Cloud Good or Bad For SEO?

One of my tasks for today, was to look at my blog, and reevaluate my sidebar.

Here are some of the elements that I have on my sidebar:

1) Optin Box

2) Latest Posts Section

3) Search Box

4) Post Categories

5) Facebook fan box

6) Tag Cloud

We could argue, about the value of each item on my sidebar, but one question came to my mind, about the value and the benefit of the tag cloud. So I decided to research the pros and cons of the tag cloud, and its effects on your blog.

Why Use Tag Cloud in Your Blog:

1) To Make Your Website or Blog a Keyword Rich Website, so that you can have a better SEO advantage

2) Also it can be a could navigation tool that your website visitor use, to navigate through different keywords of interest on your website

3) It can help you with one of the main factors of SEO, which is internal linking, since the tag cloud is basically a combination of links to content, on your website or blog

4) It can provide your blog visitors with good information about the most frequent content on your blog, so the bigger the font, of the tag, this means, that you have more content, related, to that particular content

What is a Blog Tag Cloud:

So in case you are wondering how does the tag cloud looks like, it looks like this:

Tags cloud is a visualization of the tags used in a blog. Using tags cloud, users can easily see the most used tags from the visualization used in the cloud. Tags, are used to identify keyword and content for each post, or page, on your wordpress website.

While Categories can be more general, tags, usually are more specific keywords, that accurately describe the content of your website.

Now in my opinion, tag clouds, aren’t the most appealing thing on your sidebar. So as I have been evaluating the value of it. I did my own research, and I saw 2 different perspectives.

Some group said, that it has a great benefits to the SEO effort, and the Google Spider relies on it, to go through content on your blog, and the other group dismissed that, but still I wasn’t convinced, till I saw what Matt Cuts from Google talking about them in this youtube video, and what he implied that they actually could be bad for your SEO:

Matt Cutts concludes that tag clouds are very dangerous for SEO given their impact on keyword density and link bleeding. I find this very interesting because they can be, indeed, VERY valuable for our blog visitors. And Google always maintains that what is good for the end-user is good for SEO. Well in this case, no. Matt is clear that Google is currently no good at understanding tag clouds. Best to not use them or use extreme caution when you do.

What do you think? Do you agree with Matt, do you think it is a good idea to remove them?

So it seems like, based on what I read, and what Matt is saying that Tag Clouds can be bad for SEO. I actually made the decision to remove the tag cloud off my blog, and let’s see if this affects my ranking?

Let me know, what you think. And leave me a comment below.