Blog tags contribute almost nothing to SEO and often hurt more than help. Most WordPress and CMS platforms auto-generate a tag archive page for every tag you create. If you have 50 tags across 30 blog posts, you've just created 50 new indexable pages, many showing identical or near-identical post listings. Google sees this as thin content and may devalue your entire site's authority. The core problem is dilution. Instead of consolidating topical authority into well-structured category pages or pillar content, tags scatter it across dozens of weak archive pages that compete with each other and your actual content. A tag page for "SEO tips" showing three posts has no competitive advantage over the actual posts themselves or a proper pillar page on SEO strategy. Search engines don't rank sites higher for having more tag pages. They rank sites higher for having focused, authoritative content on specific topics. Categories serve this purpose better because they force hierarchy and editorial discipline. Tags let writers add seven or eight classifications to every post, creating a categorization mess. At Ottawa SEO, we typically noindex tag pages entirely or eliminate them from the site architecture. For the 500+ domain portfolio, we've seen zero ranking drops from removing tag functionality and meaningful improvements from consolidating that topical authority into properly optimized category structures. The only legitimate use case: if you genuinely need cross-category content groupings for user experience and you actively curate those tag pages with unique descriptions, limited tag count (under 10 site-wide), and strategic noindexing of low-volume tags. Even then, a custom landing page usually works better. Tags aren't evil for internal organization or user filtering, but leave them out of your SEO strategy. If they're already indexed and causing issues, audit your tag pages in Google Search Console, noindex the thin ones, and 301 redirect any with backlinks to relevant category or pillar pages.