Tag Clouds and SEO

I've read a few comments on here recently about tagclouds been bad because of duplicate content and all that. I understand the logic, however my thinking is that a tag cloud put all the right keywords the page (i.e. the popular ones)

However what I assume people are one about is the links that are generated to the tag pages, include posts containing the tag. I assume this could be classed as duplicated content. My thinking on this would be to have these pages set with different meta tags.

So in WP you could have the

homepage, single post, page and category as index,follow

and everything else as noindex,nofollow

I may even be tempted to move the category pages out of the to index section.

What do people think about the theory?

Well I thought it was a good logical idea, nobody else have any opinions

I've never figured out any SEO benefit of tag clouds. I thought they're just for show to the blog visitors..to say that we blog so much about this particular theme...if you're interested to find out, click me.

I think you're right about the tag pages being dupe content. I have /tag/ and /tags/* added to my robots.txt, and now unique posts are getting indexed. thanks.