Disallowing Tags Page - Still get SEO Benefits?

[XenBurger]

If we "disallow" tags in our robots.txt .... that tells google not to index the specific tags page at /tags/

Understood.

What im not clear on, is whether the tags people type, are helping my site just as much pertaining to SEO. This is a complicated question because technically the only thing omitted is the indexing of that one page, right?

So any tags appearing on specific threads, should still perform their purpose for SEO benefits, correct? Its a keyword in the form of a link, on a thread page that contains chatter about that same topic.

So therefore even if you disallow tags page indexing, the tags being used on your site are still benefiting you JUST as much SEO-wise?

Careful in responding! This question has much nuance to it! :-D

 

[Jattitude]

When you disallow /tags/ you are disallowing everything in that directory so individual tags pages wont be indexed either. SEOwise? Even the gods are wondering after the 25th of June update. I have no clue.

 

[Optic]

I'm not an expert..

But I was under the impression that noindex is better for this vs. disallow in robots.txt, because otherwise Google won't be able to see the noindex tag if you block Googlebot from crawling the page:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710

Important! For the noindex meta tag to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex tag, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.

You can add a template conditional to noindex just your tags page (i.e. exclude the tag_search page template)

If you wanted to be sure perhaps adjust it to "noindex, follow" and test with Fetch As Google tool..