One of my sites is based off a Wordpress CMS. I use a tag cloud on it but with the number of tags it's growing pretty big and eating into prime advertising space. Tag clouds were supposed to be the thing to have but if you have a clear set of categories listed, do you still need the tags as well?

What do you guys think?

I think it's pretty useless, it doesn't help that one of my tags is much bigger than the others either.

I'm totally with you on the size thing. It's annoying that some of my tags mess up the format of the cell like they do.

There's some evidence that they help on very large sites by encouraging people to click and browse - on smaller sites I believe they're a waste of space if other navigation is adequate.

Tag clouds, aint they the things to tell search engines what your key words are? Is your site so crap that search engines don't know your keywords?

Yes still seeing if they are making a difference maybe a small amount more traffic

In terms of Search Engine Optimization Tag Cloud is a waste, It will cause duplicate content penalty.

Originally Posted by indianartist

In terms of Search Engine Optimization Tag Cloud is a waste, It will cause duplicate content penalty.

Google does not penalize for duplicate content.

Originally Posted by dWhite

Google does not penalize for duplicate content.

That's true, there are no penalties but you'll barely have good ranking/traffic copying well-known stuff.
Google Official Blog posts:
1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...t-penalty.html
2. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...e-content.html

While the 'tag cloud' was new and interesting when it first came out, it seems more gimmicky than anything else nowadays. For 'techy' sites it might still be an 'in' thing to have it included but for any non-technical site it's probably just a waste of usable space (especially in terms of what web site visitors think of the tag cloud).

IMHO tag clouds is pretty and may be usable but I'm never used it for find something. Somebody directly uses tag clouds?

I personally find tag clouds messy. Tho I don't mind tags below every post.