Do tags in Wordpress help with SEO?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Jim Munro: I think the only useful strategy would be .
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  Bill Hartzer: Tags or categories... not both. If you use them then I typically recommend a limited number of them.
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  Steve Wiideman: I agree with Jim. Nothing destroys conversion rates worse than a tag archive appearing in Google where an optimized landing page should have.
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  Matty Pantaloons: I concur with everything you said Alan, but why not noindex, follow, instead of noindex, nofollow?
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  Matty Pantaloons: I recently removed all of the tags from a client`s blog whose writer had added maybe 100 tags, almost all of them cannibalizing category labels as well as a couple of very similar labels for each category, all of course for "SEO". I deleted them and sent the writer an email explaining why. Oooooh frosty vibes for a while. She was convinced she was doing the right thing.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Building on all of these valid responses... Order of use: 1. Categories. These should be your most important/primary topics relevant to the site`s goals. Ideally between four and eight main categories, ten at most. 2. Subcategories. These should be sub-topics within individual main categories. 3. Tags. These should be against the law. The original concept of tags was that individual posts across different category/subcategory combinations share common topical themes that bridge across separate category/subcategory silos. Tragically, most of the world`s publishers and authors have butchered the concept, assigning so many ridiculous tags to individual posts as to cause massive levels of stupidity, needless crawl inefficiency, perceived duplicate content, and usability nightmares. IF you allow tags, they need to be truly unique, and thus not cannibalizing of category or subcategory topical focus. They must be assigned gently, so as to not become abusive, or overwhelming, or to the point of causing over-optimization signals. To be truly safe, IF you use them, it is almost always still safest to noindex,nofollow them. Just to be safe.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Noindex, follow creates a false additional path to content that should already be accessible through links from pages that are indexable. The noindexed pages have zero SEO value, so none gets distributed to the target pages. So all around, it creates wasteful crawl.
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  Jim Munro: Let me jump in and pretend I sound knowledgeable but really it`s just dawned on me because of what Alan said. :) If a page is noindex = not_in_the_index, then it has no link equity to distribute.
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  Matty Pantaloons: I usually avoid noindex without an accompanying follow to avoid evaporating link equity. Am I misguided here?
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  Matty Pantaloons: This is how I always understood it: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/67884/do-noindex-follow-pages-pass-pagerank-link-juice
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  Alan Bleiweiss: It`s wasting PageRank. Let`s say Matt and John Mu were correct. If I have a blog post with a PageRank of 100. That post links to five other pages, all indexable, and five tag pages. Why would I want to dilute the PageRank to the five indexable pages? It`s insane. This is why people get into trouble, not visualizing the complexity of next level SEO, not understanding the implications or ramifications, and not realizing that one off answers Matt used to give or John still gives, are isolated and don`t discuss the more complex considerations. Using noindex, follow has ramifications. And playing with it leads to mythical page sculpting.
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  Matty Pantaloons: I definitely what you`re saying especially with huge sites where crawl efficiency is a factor. Barring eff-ups in crawling, and for fun, ignoring crawl efficiency, and just for clarity, would you say that noindex, follow on tag/cat pages would have the same end result, PR-wise ?
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  Alan Bleiweiss: It doesn`t evaporate. What little value that passes to tag pages does pass through if you noindex, follow. However I find success in more tightly controlling the flow based on only indexable pages. By mirroring follow to match indexable, more value passes through paths that matter for indexation. Since tag and any other noindex pages don`t have their own PageRank, its only pass through value. Sending PageRank flow through excess pages require more on Google`s part to `figure it all out". That`s another issue that is severely flawed. I prefer to avoid that whenever possible. Let`s also remember that Google sometimes indexes pages that have a noindex flag or are blocked in robots.txt files. That happens when algorithms become overtaxed with mixed signals.
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  Matty Pantaloons: Just to clarify, when doesn`t PR evaporate?
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  Matty Pantaloons: Nvm, tired, was thinking of rel nofollow duh...
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  Matty Pantaloons: Won`t the PageRank just flow through the tag pages to pages that are indexed instead of just evaporating?
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  Matty Pantaloons: Hey Alan - the only shiny object I`m chasing is exploring scenarios, even less efficient ones, just to get a better understanding. I`m not challenging you here.
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  Matty Pantaloons: Brb, 8 hrs of zzzz`s needed.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Matty I don`t have any desire, or willingness to do the math to guess whether noindex,follow would have the same end result PR-wise. It`s shiny object chasing. To be fair, I live in a world where consistency of signals is critical. My work depends on it. For a 10 or 50 or even a 100 page site, noindex,follow is probably fine. yet the moment anyone starts trying to "figure out which is more helpful" for things like that, my response is that there are 50 other way more important issues to focus on. And since noindex,follow does have other, real, negative ramifications on larger scale sites, my belief is that there needs to be one model to stick with even when a site is smaller, so that if it ever does grow, there`s no need to go back and say "what did we do on this site that is no longer valid or helpful?"...