Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
-
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags.
Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial?
Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic...
Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
-
I approve of this comment
-
Hey There
For the most part, it is not a good idea to just use tags as a way to try and gain search traffic from them. They are possibly beneficial to users internal to your site. Users may read an article and want to read other similar articles, so having a few tags at the bottom of the post can be useful. Putting tags in your sidebar for navigation is rarely useful, but if done in a somewhat user friendly way it could work. I generally avoid "tag clouds" or having dozens of tag links in one spot.
In terms of the tag archives themselves (like mysite.com/blog/tag/tag-name/), tag archives rarely look different than posts themselves or other archives. Unless you have a giant site, with so many posts, and tags actually add a beneficial way to scroll through archives on a very specific topic, categories do this fine enough.
And for indexation - if it's a new site or a site that has NOT ever indexed tags I would advise to not index them moving forward either. Unless in a rare .5% of cases this is done in an extremely intentional and strategic way, not for SEO but for users and site architecture. (Think of a site like Smashing Magazine or Search Engine Land with LOTS of content, that's a rare edge case where using tags for navigation and architecture might make sense.)
If you HAVE indexed tags already I wrote an article on how to safely evaluate and noindex them.
In general, I would avoid tagging a post with more than 4-5 tags. Tags should always be different from categories (like more specific things).
-Dan
-
So much depends on how you've implemented tags on your site and who your audience is.
It can be tempting to implement tags to try and make up for a broken categorisation and it's tempting to add tags to a page because they mention a topic rather than because it's actually relevant to that tag.
It worth taking a look at your analytics to see if (and how) your visitors are using your tag pages. I've see many sites where visitors just don't use the tags (there too many, they're meaning less, or even they are not obviously links!) and a lot of this depends on just how many tags your using, how meaningful these tags are to people and the relevance and quality of the articles you have associated with each tag.
Have you got internal search set up on your site and are you capturing the search data in your analytics? This can provide some great insights in what people are struggling to find on your site and what they expect to find. It can also highlight areas where your IA isn't working.
(As James mentioned) If your tag pages are indexed, and getting inbound search traffic then segment your non-paid search traffic and look at the bounce rate and other engagement metrics. How valuable is this traffic to you, and how relevant are they finding your tag pages as the answer to their query?
-
Also check how much traffic the tags are currently getting, one site I have looked at in the past had like 16k uv a month from some tags on the site so proceed with caution also I agree with the advice above as well.
-
Hey there
Dan Shure wrote this fantastic Wordpress optimisation guide here on the Moz blog a year or so ago and it is still very relevant for today. In that post, he goes into depth about the problems with tags and what your best practice should be. Usually, you want to noindex the tags on your WP site - keep them for navigation purposes if you want, but letting them be indexed can lead to duplicate content issues.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
What is really a bad link in 2017?
Hi, Routine answer is: A link which doesn't provides any value. Tired of listening to this statement where we can see number of back-links been generated with different scenarios. There are still many low DA websites which speaks exactly about a brand and link a brand naturally. So, is this a bad link or good link? Let's be honest here. No one gonna visit such pages and browse through our website; it's all about what it's been doing in-terms of SEO. Do these websites to be in disavow list? Beside the context how a brand been mentioned, what are the other metrics to disavow a domain? Expecting some real answers for this straight question. If it's a low DA site and speaking about exactly our website- Good or bad? Vice-versa...high DA website mentioned website with less matching content. What is the proportion of website authority and content context? Can we keep a medium DA backlinks with some Moz spam score?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Strange referral site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com would like some insights from the community
Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Ever seen this tactic when trying to get rid of bad backlinks?
I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre. Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com. One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/... So when I visit http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on. And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com. So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Patrick_G0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Multiple H1 tags are OK according to developer. I have my doubts. Please advise...
Hi, My very well known and widely respected developer is using multiple H1 tags I see - they like using them in their code and they argue multiple H1s conform with HTML5 standards. They are resisting a recode to one H1 tag per page. However, I know this is clearly an issue in Bing, so I don't want to risk it with Google. Any thoughts on whether it's best to avoid multiple H1 tags in Google (any evidence and reasoning would be great - I can then put that to my developer...) Many thanks for your help, Luke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Melia0 -
Why are these sites so high with poor relevant links...
Hello, Keyword: TV Stands. I have been researching competitors for a client and we seem to be unable to understand why certains pages are ranking on page 1 of Google UK for keyword TV Stands. eg: http://www.furnitureinfashion.net/plasma-TV-stand.html (Google UK 8 - TV Stands) http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999542/Nr.99.aspx (Google UK 9 - TV Stands) The furniture in fashion has links from sites like: http://www.ummah.com/forum/ and http://www.muslimco.com/ which is totaly irrelevant to the site. Any ideas on other things as the tesco.com site does not have direct links to it. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnW-UK0