Anyone found any benefit having tags indexed?

I like tags, I force a minimum of two per thread. My only complaint is I wish there were some more addons that made use of this. I know there are a couple, but I haven't found a good one yet.
 
I use the Tag Essentials add-on and really like the auto-fill function. It is not required for members to put any tags. Some fill it up (on one forum, on another nothing), the staff tries to add some useful ones and so it goes.

I also notice tags could be good for SEO and search engines.
 
From what I have seen there is no benefit to using tags and hasn't been for a long time. Google has said for nearly 15 years they ignore keyword tagging and do not base any search engine ranking off of it. Yes, there are other search engines out there but Google accounts for 92% of the search engine market share and your decisions involving search engine ranking should highly revolve around them.

Just by the way search engines split page content weight, having tag index pages and tag clouds will take away ranking weight from actual content pages within your own site. My suggestion to everyone would be to disable all keywords and content tagging and exclude tags from your sitemap. Keywords/tagging were a highly abused thing of the past and modern search engines do what it was suppose to do much better by themselves these days.
 
Adding meta no index to my tag pages has definitely increased the quality of my site's results in Google.
For example.... "completive keyword" used to bring up my site's tag page as the top result from my site... Now it brings my in depth AMS articles or threads. :)

Threads and articles would come up with a broader search but the completive main keyword would almost always bring up tag page for some searches. Now they show better content which means better quality traffic.
 
I don't think tags themselves are a problem as it can help site members find stuff. It's just that you shouldn't allow Google to index tag pages.
 
Yes, understand, I've set it to noindex for robots, but still, not sure if this really helps users. I actually never use tags for searching. Never. I just thought users would like it, but I don't think they use it too.
 
So you're not using it either...

I always wanted to see some benefit from tags, I still like them. But if it's only me and a few others...
 
/tags still drives a good amount of traffic to my XF site.

Last 7 days stats (1.2% of my total page views last 7 days)
Isn't it worth it? :unsure:
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Personally I find that it adds a constraint to the users and who in addition do not care about the possible benefit for the site in terms of SEO. Then it adds work to the staff who must constantly correct them because there are many spelling mistakes. And then who actually uses it? Natively they are almost invisible under the content titles...
 
Tags are good to have if you’re planning on having threads sit in one category and allowing your users to select predefined tags.

On JoyFreak, only an admin or author can select tags to tag thread articles.

They have their benefits depending on how you use it.

If you’re going to let any users define tags then set it so it does not index on search engines so you don’t exhaust your crawl budget.

Don’t think too deep into it. There’s literally no seo benefit unless you target it for seo.
 
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