If I tag my posts in two or three different categories, is it good for SEO or a bad practice?

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

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  Sanyam Khurana: If I tag my posts in two or three different categories, is it good for SEO or a bad practice?
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  Edwin Jonk: I assume you have WordPress. Personally I would block Googlebot from the tag pages. ;
  
  Here is a video talking about tags and pagerank sculpting:
  Do tag clouds help or hinder SEO?
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  Chris M Cloutier: My understanding of this, is that its bad.  ;I'm not 100% sure about the other reasons but I think it makes the duplicate content situation a little worse.
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  Sanyam Khurana: I'm not talking about tags, I'm talking about categories.. and yes +Chris M Cloutier I have read it some where that it creates an issue such as duplicate contents, so just wanted to know by asking here..
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  Edwin Jonk: Can you access the same page through different URL's? If that is the case than yes you have duplicated content. If you cannot serve one unique URL for every page you can use a 301. If you cannot do a 301 a solution is to use rel canonical.
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  Devin Peterson: It makes sense to assign multiple categories/sub-categories to different posts from time to time (from UX perspective). Reputable websites do it often. I would try to keep it to 1-2 when possible but 3 isn't terrible. Additionally, I would try to diversify the posts that get tagged to different categories. So that catX and CatY and CatZ don't always have the same posts, just occasionally. This help? Also. do these categories only display short excerpts? If so, then it's even less of an issue. I like ;+Edwin Jonk ;s suggestion if youre using "tags" though.
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  Sanyam Khurana: I'm able to get a unique url for every post, and in my menu bar, I display all categories.. I have one post which I assigned to two categories, so both of these category archives show the post there.. but if I want to see post, there is only one url of the post.
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  Edwin Jonk: +Sanyam Khurana ;can you share links as an example? Because it is quite hard to determine what you mean. ;
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  Sanyam Khurana: +Edwin Jonk ok, here it is..
  
  consider this post :
  www.thegeekyway.com/asp-net-basics-populate-checkboxlist-database-using-c-dotnet/
  
  and it is posted in two categories, so it would show here :http://www.thegeekyway.com/category/programming/c-programming-2/
  
  and http://www.thegeekyway.com/category/web-development/net/
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  Edwin Jonk: I see. The post is also in the main category's. As +Devin Peterson ;already said, I think it is okay because it makes sense for the user and the individual posts have unique URL's.
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  Sanyam Khurana: Ok thanks :)
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 02:22:22 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/if_i_tag_my_posts_in_two_or_three_different_categories_is_it_good_for_seo_or_a_bad_practice +Sanyam Khurana
  
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