If you thought tagging was good for search engine traffic, you’d be wrong!

For a long time, it has been common wisdom that adding tags to your lens would help it rank better on the search engines. In theory, your lens would receive link juice from these pages, loaded with relevance and PageRank.

There’s plenty of advice on the subject: MrLewisSmile has done a very popular lens on tagging tricks, PotPieGirl did a blog post on how Squidoo tags are important, and CaptainSquid wrote how link juice flows from tag pages.

There are also several eBooks that people pay money for that include chapters on how tags help your SEO efforts. I was even about to write my own blog post explaining it further, until I discovered that the tags don’t work.

While Google has some tag pages in its index, these were all cached in 2007 or earlier - there are no new tag pages cached in 2008! Yahoo doesn’t have any tag pages at all in its index; not even one.

Why is this? Continue reading “Squidoo Tag Pages Have No SEO Benefit!”