No. Tag clouds does not have any significant SEO importance. Just disable them if they waste the space or affect the neatness. I remember I too had the very same problem and question 2 years back! I am not using tags on my professional blogs and they do rank well.

Hi Bryan,

It leads to duplicated content. If you want to leave it, "noindex" derective should be used to prevent indexing. You can control it with any seo wordpress plugin.


Rich

You guys must be doing the Tag Clouds wrong, or running a poor quality WP plugin.

I run a Tag Cloud at the bottom of my Index page, & a canonical tag on every single page of my site with specific URLs.

If you setup your site correct the tag cloud will help rank your tag pages in the SERPs.

All my Tag & Category pages are indexed in Google SERPs, along with the usual Post & Pages.

OP, check your Google Cache (text version) & see how Google displays your Tag Cloud.