Noindex on Wordpress Tags Pages

[Goath]

I want to noindex the tags pages created by Wordpress, but the tag pages have the purpose to interlink all articles on my website, thus every page gets found by bots and also the tag pases pass some link juice to other relevant articles in my website...

But, when I decide to noindex them, are they losing their "link juice compenent"

Also, I am a little bit confused. Can someone explain me why tags are important or why not (from a SEO perspective)

Thanks...

[C Rebecca]

Well, if you make them noindex they will not be cralwed. And, since they are connecting your pages and passing link juice... this all will be ignored bu SE bots.

Every tags has its own defined purpose and importance. For instance title tags and description tags are very important because they tell SEs about title and descrription and this may impact your rankings.

[LinkVariety]

Originally Posted by C Rebecca

Well, if you make them noindex they will not be cralwed.

That is incorrect, no index is in the html head, the page must be read by search engines to determine that it is no index. If it doest read the page then how does it ever see the html tag?

You are confusing noindex with robots.txt that stops crawlers.

It is weird situation because pages blocked by robots.txt can still index based on links pointing to them. To stop a page indexing you actually have to allow the page to be crawled for the search engines to see that you do not want it indexed.

[LinkVariety]

Originally Posted by Goath

I want to noindex the tags pages created by Wordpress, but the tag pages have the purpose to interlink all articles on my website, thus every page gets found by bots and also the tag pases pass some link juice to other relevant articles in my website...

But, when I decide to noindex them, are they losing their "link juice compenent"

Also, I am a little bit confused. Can someone explain me why tags are important or why not (from a SEO perspective)

Thanks...

Well there was an article by Matt Cutts a long time ago that suggested noindex pages could pass Page Rank, but whether that is still true I dont know, you would expect the pages to be devalued at the least.

Your WP site will index fine with categories.

Tags add a lot of duplicate content, I just deleted a load of tags off one of my sites that lost its rank, the author I use to write on that site had added a lot of tags and there was consequently a load of dupe content on the site.

I was adding tags for users benefit.

I actually think they are a nuisance in terms of ranking a site. If your only motivation is to "improve rank" then personally I would delete the tags all together. I am sure others will disagree with that, but my experience has always been that a simpler site with concise categories is a lot easier to rank than a sprawling site which is made up of a high % of category, archive and tag pages, which are all dupe content.