We do. CC has a long tail when it comes to search terms. For instance, this thread shows up on the first page of results for “the end of faking it in silicon valley”. Not a lot of people are searching that exact phrase, but we got a few hundred clicks from it this week. As that news story cycles out, people will stop using that search query and we’ll stop getting traffic from it. Another (on-topic) example, is “X waitlist 2027” where X is one of the schools that has a waitlist. None of those queries are super popular, but the CC discussion tends to be right at the top of search results. CC even out-ranks the school’s page sometimes.
Yes. We see a lot of traffic from searches in the form “X college confidential” where X is a school. Since we tag schools, the tag page will show up among the results along with the category and some of the most active threads.
Google also uses tags to index content. It’s not easy to determine how much weight Google puts on that data point. I do know from other sites that adding a tag to content that doesn’t have that particular search term can help Google link the content to the tag name. Tags can help get content noticed.