Andy Beard started a Google Groups thread asking why Google seems to be handling tagged pages (tag cloud results) in a “fairly random fashion.” Andy goes through examples of how Google sometimes indexes these pages, sometimes shows a cache page, sometimes ranks them well and sometimes not.

Google’s JohnMu has a fairly long response on the topic. In short, John said he does not believe that Google treats tag pages any different than any other page on the Internet. Let me quote John:

But tag pages can be problematic in many cases because:

They don’t often have very much unique content from your other pagesSome tags may be very close to others, where the only difference may be punctuation or capitalizationIn a sense, they are a form of search results – kind of

We went through this dilemma when adding our tag cloud about a year ago. Honestly, I find my tag cloud here incredibly useful and relevant for my search experience – so I am glad I allowed it to be indexed.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.