SEO URL structure for tag search on site

Question

I am looking to add tags to each product on my site e.g. brown, x products under £x, second hand x, refurbished x etc.

Once you click these tags it will then search for other tags that are similar. I was thinking of using a url structure of www.site.com/tags/this%is%the%tag%name and then simply have a page that shows the results of all the products with that tag.

I heard a while back that google generally ignores or downgrades anything with ‘search’ in the url and was wondering if anyone had any experience with this? Also, would you say /tags/ is a pretty valid destination or is it best to break it down and add more levels e.g. /product-type/product%variation

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You might find these two Matt Cutts videos interesting:

• Do tag clouds help or hinder SEO?
• Is it worth spending time on creating tags and categories

As long as it is useful for your users it should not become a problem. (If it would you can always set up NOINDEX,FOLLOW META tags to indicate that you don't want the pages indexed).

What can become a problem is if you display too much content on the result pages in a way they are recognized as "duplicate" content so they won't rank well or at all. The majority of content should be on the detail page of the items.

Answer 2

By all means you could use a hierarchical URL approach for tags. The key is to keep it structured. As a for instance, I would use the following approach given your scenarios:

• /tags/products/color/brown
• /tags/products/price/under-100
• /tags/products/status/refurbished

Assuming all products are properly tagged in a database, it then becomes a rather trivial matter of fetching them based off the URL. As far as pulling up similar tags, that is also trivial if you implement it in this type of hierarchical manner.

As far as this being a bad / black-hat technique, that is simply untrue. If you were creating dynamic pages to be indexed based off of user search results, that would be bad. However you are not doing that... you are creating permalink search pages with relevant content, so you should be in the clear. On that note, however, I would say not to create too many tags. The lower the ratio of (actual content) / (tag search results) is, the more spammy your site will appear to bots.