First, I’ll clarify that we had nothing to do with this change, although for years in the past we explicitly blocked crawling of tag pages because we believed search engines might not find them particularly valuable. With this change, it seems that Google agrees and is finally smart enough to do something about it.

SEOs talk about indexing and ranking….

Do tag pages help with indexing? It’s possible, although there are probably more efficient ways to help Googlebot discover each important page on the site, given that there are 10mm or more unique tags and lenses could be on multiple tag results pages. Googlebot only crawls a certain number of pages per day, and I’d much rather them spend time on content-rich pages than simple lists of lenses. In addition, sitemaps and other cues ensure that Googlebot already has plenty of direction. There are no indications of indexing problems on Squidoo.

Do tag pages help with ranking? Years ago, I believe that internal links carried significant weight in Google’s algorithm. However, there are many more signals that Google uses these days, and the quantity of internal inbound links simply doesn’t seem very relevant anymore. Google seems to be saying: enough with the indexes, show us more of the content.

If you are interested in the current state of SEO, I recommend exploring SEOmoz’s 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors Report.

So it’s Google’s choice, not code, that’s deprecating more tag pages now than before. Iiinnteresting.

One comment I would make though is this: just because Google isn’t showing cache: links for the tag pages doesn’t mean that those links aren’t counted for ranking porpoises (sic).

Incidentally, there are some tag pages still in Google’s cache.

And you’re right; the value of their backlink is somewhat limited. So there is a certain sense in demoting them. It still feels a little alarming having so many interlinking routes disappearing at once.

Fluff will know. May tug on him when he gets back, assuming he doesn’t see this post anyway.

And you’re quite right about categories. A pity they’ve turned into such a mess so fast.

This tells me that the pages are definitely seen by Google, though it does look like something of a supplemental index. I can’t blame Google for that: tag pages are as much duplicate content as any scraped page. There’s a reason SEO’s tend to want to be able to add a description to a tag page on their blogs (but that’s off topic).

However, it’s clear Google has decided they’re not important. That’s unwelcome news of course. Still, there’s good reason to think they ARE seen and used by BING.

http://www.squidoo.com/robots.txt

Note too that if tags don’t matter (I’m not convinced they don’t btw), squidoo categories have become VERY important.

However, as he has not been seen around for awhile, and it is the school holidays here, methinks he is probably on vacation.

I would like to raise one point that you make. Sadly, much as I would like to leave space for three lenses that are not my own on the Discovery Module, like many of our Squidoo friends and colleagues, I do not.

This is because at least one Lensmaster has harvested my keywords in order to make a directly competing lens (Statcounter shows him on my lenses at the time he did it) and I could not bear it if any of his crap lenses appeared on my lenses.

And from comments made on SquidU I know it has happened to others too.

So perhaps one of the reasons that Squidoo is removing the “power of tags” is because they are well aware of the tactics being used by some less than “nice” Lensmasters. Who knows?