Tags in a Blog, are they....

....necessary?

In other words, does having tags on your post benefit at all? I remove the tags in my wordpress blogs and am now wondering am I negatively effecting my SEO

Any thoughts?

Many of my traffic are coming from tags from google search. I have 20k+tags in 2 categories in 1 autoblog.

beaglejuice said:

Many of my traffic are coming from tags from google search. I have 20k+tags in 2 categories.

Click to expand...

wow, sounds great.

when you say your traffic comes from Tags, what do you mean exactly. Do you mean that the Tag words appeare in search engines?

Can you explain a little further as I dont really have a clue about Tags and their uses

When I type site:yoururl.com in google search, most of the results are from yoururl.com/tag/yoursite's tag/

I'm no seo expert but from what I've research from wordpress forums, tags are valuable seo requirement. Categories are not.

interesting. Do you have any links to some reading I can do? I cant find anything that explains this.

Is there any danger of duplicate content etc? Do you know of any sites that use tags so I check them out?
Sorry about all the questions mate, appreciate your help

I can't recall the wordpress topic I research but I remember that I was looking for a way to get rid of 20k tags and 20k categories and I read that tags should be kept and categories minimized.

I'm not worried of duplicate content for the meantime because I'm able to dupe big G using a wp plugin I got from here and eventually bought. But this is blackhat so I expect big G will probably catch up soon---> After I make enough to move on, lol...