Tags clouds, good or bad for seo

I have just done the zoints create tags, then imported all the tags into vb.

Now my question are

Are tags clods good or bad for seo

If they are good
How many tags in a cloud
And whats the best place to show the tags cloud, IE forum home, forum display, footer header etc etc

Thanks in advance for any help
And I'm sorry if this has been discussed before

I feel like adding tags has increased my SERP, and this makes sense because tagged threads have more keyword density, while at the same time it increases your deep linking by showing that thread under a given tag search.

Tag pages, by the way, tend to be indexed in the supplementary index, so I don't believe that the general tag cloud for your forum adds value by itself.

I have tried adding the tags cloud to the forum display pages rather than the forum home, in a hope of building key word density.

But in all honesty, I'm not sure if its good or bad. I think I need to spend a couple of morning's killing off a lot of the junk tags, IE all the number related and non forum specific stuff.

My traffic peaked in the week then went into a gradual decline. So everything is either being re indexed or I was having a good couple of days.

Plus the other factor to consider is summer has just kicked in, so more people will be by the pool, rather than trawling the internet

Give it a couple of weeks and see how the traffic goes rather than jump in and mess things up yet again

Originally Posted by amenadiel

I feel like adding tags has increased my SERP, and this makes sense because tagged threads have more keyword density, while at the same time it increases your deep linking by showing that thread under a given tag search.

Tag pages, by the way, tend to be indexed in the supplementary index, so I don't believe that the general tag cloud for your forum adds value by itself.

very well said and agreed, make sure you do not have more then 80 links on any page..
if you are displaying around 50 threads on a forumdisplay page keep 30 tags for your forumdisplay pages.

Also make sure you do not add more then 10 tags to every showthread pages..
I wont recommend displaying a tag cloud on forumhome though, just display your siteroot/tag.page link

Thanks for those tips. Thats answered questions I forgot to ask and intended to

is there away for auto adding tags? e.g threads in a certain cat, e.g news will auto be tagged "news" etc etc?

There are two auto taggers on vb.org

But neither do rss feeds as yet. One was half way there when the designer pulled out. Someone else has taken it over, but as yet no new release.

They work well on human created posts though.

The way round tagging all your forum is to load zoints. Tag everything, then import those tags into vb tags with another add on, which is on vb org. Then kill zoints.

If your looking to add news to the all the tags in one forum, add it to the rss feed in the thread title, then do the above.