Should I add meta “noindex, nofollow” to a Tag cloud page?

Question

I have a giant tag cloud on my site and I'm trying to optimize it for search engine crawlers in order to avoid keyword stuffing penalties.

In your experience, adding noindex or nofollow to the Tag cloud page could have some Seo result?

Are there some best practices to properly code a huge Tag cloud with hundreds of internal links?

Answer 1

Should? No.
Why would you nofollow your own links to your own site?
If you don't want the tag pages indexed(different thing), that's your own choice and you can add the directive as a meta tag on the relevant page template, or you can just do it via robots.txt.

Do you have:

1. a tag cloud somewhere on your site, like a page dedicated to it, or
2. a giant cloud in a sidebar that appears everywhere on the site?

That post, and the Matt Cutts video, are mostly addressing the second case. If that's what you're doing, you really just need to reduce the size of the cloud.

For the first case, just noindex the page containing the cloud itself(as you'll see the StackExchange sites do). There's no reason to nofollow the actual links; the cloud being a massive block of text is the problem, not the links.

Answer 2

Millions of websites have tag clouds on their pages. Its not a big deal at all. RAther than nofollow them either leave it alone, consolidate some of the tags, or take them out all together.