I want to know how to put a tag cloud in Blogger and wordpress. I have 2 blogs and someone told me that it can be good to have those clouds.

I'm not sure they're necessarily good or bad. If you're thinking they're going to help with search rankings they won't. If anything they'll probably create duplicate content issues.

Here's a good article about tags in WordPress and here's an article describing a plugin to create a tag cloud.

maybe this can help: http://www.yvoschaap.com/tagcloud/in...lename=nyt.com

not really about this too... coz its kinda messy.

Hello,
I am the developer of www.MakeCloud.com, a tool that simplifies the process of creating a tag cloud. It is very easy to use it to add a tag cloud to a Blogger blog. I have a screencast that shows how to do it in under 2 minutes. Heres a link to the video:

http://www.makecloud.com/add_tag_cloud_to_blog.html

If I'm not mistaken, don't tag clouds in blogs produce duplicate content issues if not done properly? Make sure all tag cloud links point to the same source as the original content.

Tag clouds can produce duplicate content. Point them to the same source as the original or block them from being indexed.

I don't think internally duplicate content bothers Google.

Forrest I think if you're only talking about a few pages it's probably not a big deal, but if it's the kind of thing where your entire site shows up as duplicate I think it can be the difference in ranking and not ranking at all.

I didn't jot down the url, but Chris Hirst posted a video of Vanessa Fox being interviewed last year. She said that Google realizes a lot of sites are set up dynamically, in a way that makes several urls all point to the same content. She specifically said "There's no penalty for duplicate content within a site." Which makes me wonder about the no penalty in general...

It seems to be Google's way to tolerate things at a small scale, and hand down punishments when things are excessive. So they might take offense ... although I would expect it to be hard for a personal blog to get to the level of excessive.

I know the video. I think it was from one of the SES conferences last year. If you remind me I'll try to dig up a link for it. If I'm remembering the video correctly what Vanessa was saying was if you have more than one URL displaying the same content Google would figure it out and pick one to go with. That may not be the one you want.

I don't think this is about a penalty or anything. If a site has a lot of pages, but few links Google might deem the site overall as less important than a site with the same amount of pages and more incoming links.

Duplicate content is creating more pages for your site so the ratio of links/pages goes down, which could lead Google to think your site has is less important.

I think you've seen the post I wrote about how the feed for my blog got indexed and I was suffering from duplicate content issues. I blocked the feed and thus the duplicate content and traffic from Google increased a few thousand percent in under 2 weeks. That issue was with the supplemental index, which Google says no longer exists, but I think the issue is still essentially the same.

It comes down to looking like you have a very large site with few incoming links. I'll hopefully be able to prove this to you in a few weeks. I have a client who's had her URLs rewritten quite a few times and all versions were indexed by Google. Basically a site with a few hundred pages was showing 5,000+ URLs as having been indexed. I've blocked as many of the old URLs as I could find through robots.txt and we're waiting for Googlebot to come around and remove the pages from the index. Unfortunately those pages don't get spidered all that often, but we're down to under 2,000 pages as of a few days ago.

If what I'm saying is right the site should see improved rankings and traffic before too long. I have seen some improvement, but it's too soon to say anything definitive.

That sounds like the right video, and I remember reading the post on your blog about the feed and the supplemental index. Although it's possible things have changed in Google's algorithm since then.

Interesting about the links/pages ratio; I hadn't really thought in those terms. It makes sense when you describe a very large site with relatively few inbound links. What happens when you look at the page level? My tag pages probably don't have a single link between them, but my posts all have plenty. Is there a conceptual difference between a big site with few links overall, and a site with some popular and some hardly known pages?

Without a job at Google - even though I worked in Kirkland for more than six months - I went and removed my tags, internal searches, and other useless pages using robots.txt and nofollow links.

I know we all think of ranking in terms of page level, but a lot does happen at the site level too. This might be tied into authority. Say you have one page on your site that has a lot of incoming links, but the rest of your pages have little to none. The one page will likely rank well where the other pages won't.

If your site is pulling in links to a lot of different pages then some pages that don't have a lot of links can probably still rank well because the site as a whole has links.

If your posts have incoming links and they link out to your tag pages then your tag pages will still have link equity. The might not have incoming external links directly, but the juice is flowing indirectly to them.

This is getting somewhat off topic from the original question, but I've already nofollowed all the links in my tag cloud and blocked them in robots.txt. Part of the reason was the possibility of throwing too much dupe content - although this was before I saw the video - and part was that nofollowing the links should give more power to the important ones on the page, that point at real posts.

The tag pages are useful for people who already like my site, and want to know what I've said on a particular topic. But for a person who's never been to my site, coming in from a search engine, they're not at all helpful; I get annoyed when I land on a page like that. So I think it makes sense to hide them from search engines.

On the other hand, a tag cloud is more compact, less formal, and shows more or at least different information visually. My categories are arranged into a tree, so you can see how they relate to each other, but it's not obvious how many posts sit behind each. The tag cloud shows whether the page behind the link is almost empty or packed full. And I have a lot more tags than categories: Rockies and Cascades versus the Columbia River ... which spans both.