Should I use Tags in my Blog?

[Gorkfu]

Should I use tags in my blog? I thought it may hinder SEO, especially if you go nuts with the tags and then have articles spanning across several pages. This may look a little duplicated to google etc.

What do you all think about this?

[deluxdon]

I want to ask the same question as so many blogs using tags.

DON.

[rhyswynne]

Well, as somebody who used tags for a while, I'd say go for it. Your blog will appear in tag search engines, and be better indexed in google blog search/technorati/etc.. A lot of big websites and mainstream media use these tags to find related stories.

One such occassion was when I wrote about the Eurovision song contest a few years ago, it got featured on about.com

Lordi's Eurovision Victory Heard Around the World: The Weekly Pop Music Blog Roundup

Did lead to a massive traffic spike.

[sums123]

Nothing wrong in adding link of your site in blog,infact it is the healthy process of bringing traffict towards your site.

[KingPin]

What has adding links in blog go to do with OP's question?

Anyways, I am with Rhys on this one. Tags are used for Blog SE's such as IceRocket, Technorati and so on.

They are even used in social bookmark sites.

KP

[Gorkfu]

Thanks for the answers all. Ok so it's a good thing for all the blog service websites. I didn't really think about that before. If that's the case, wouldn't need to worry about google then? With the whole duplication content thing.

[KingPin]

Tags are not content so I don't see how Google or any other engine penalize you for that.

KP

[tb987]

Tags are not content so I don't see how Google or any other engine penalize you for that.

KP

I guess it is the tag pages that they are concerned about, where it gives the same snippets but grouped according to tags.

From my personal experience and this is using snippets from newspaper sites i.e. not just duplicated on my site. Google doesn't seem to penalise these and the site still ranks well. I even put a link back to the orginal article!

[camp185]

Your blog will appear in tag search engines

Good enough reason for me!

[zurk]

I use tags! :0
I just use minimal though, don't want to stuff them all in one article.