BBCode in the Description field
When I read the following, from Google's official Webmaster Central blog, it really got my attention regarding my tag pages:
One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that
low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or
improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain
could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content. (
source; emphasis mine)
This is Google flat out telling us that if it finds thin content on some of our pages, that can impact our entire site's ranking. Well, tag pages accumulate pagerank because of all of their inlinks, so they are likely to be some of the first pages indexed. They also don't change often (not fresh) and they are also very thin, as they barely have a complete sentence on them (if Word has been able to estimate the "reading level" of your documents for a decade, I would bet that Google is
using a similar signal in Panda). Tagging still seems to work wonders SEO-wise, but what can we do to avoid thin content/Panda penalties to our whole site from the tag pages.
Luckily, XenTag has given us exactly the thing. By adding a couple of paragraphs of text to the description field of our most popular tags, we solve our thin content problem. As indicated by the graphic in my previous post, users with appropriate permissions can even do this from the front end.
.... but they can't use any formatting. It's just pure text. No character formatting, no links, no lists, no graphics, no indents, no videos. Nothing. None of the BBCode or HTML goodness that we are used to.
It would be awfully nice if we could use BBCode formatting in the description field.