Tag clouds: good for internal linking and increase of keyword relevant pages?

[semantopic]

As Matt Cutts explained, tag clouds are OK if you're not engaged in keyword stuffing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg) - i.e. if you're not putting in 500 tags.

I'm currently creating tags for an online-bookseller; just like Amazon this e-commerce-site has potentially a couple of million books. Tag clouds will be added to each book detail page in order to enrich each of these pages with relevant keywords both for search engines and users (get a quick overview over the main topics of the book; navigate the site and find other books associated with each tag).

Each of these book-specific tag clouds will hold up to 50 tags max, typically rather in the range of up to 10-20.

From an SEO perspective, my question is twofold:

1. Does the site benefit from these tag clouds by improving the internal linking structure?

2. Does the site benefit from creating lots of additional tag-specific-pages (up to 200k different tags) or can these pages become a problem, as they don't contain a lot of rich content as such but rather lists of books associated with each tag?

Thanks in advance!

[dignan99]

Alexander,

I think you may have answered your own question.  If Matt Cutts says they are fine but don't use them to increase your potential keyword percentage, I wouldn't do it.  If you utilize a tag cloud to help navigate your site/posts/pages then go for it.

As always, it always comes down to quality, unique content.  There is no way of getting around it, so just build excellent site navigation, and proper linkage in your homepage content and you're set.

Best of luck.