Wordpress Tags and Catagories
-
I am looking for data in regards to Wordpress and blog tags and categories. Wordpress has these identifies in there tool, but I see them being used less and less. Wordpress also creates annoying pages and duplicate content errors when using tags. Should I remove these tags and categories to improve SEO?
I am also wondering if anyone has noticed a difference in user experience and traffic when changing these.
-
Hi Eric,
Without having too much info to work from, it does sound like you're on the right track here. If the tags aren't really serving a purpose there's no reason to have them junking up your site with duplicates.
If those tags are removed correctly they won't generate 404s because nothing should be linking to them. The only way you might end up with an internal 404 through removing them is if you've linked directly to them in your content.
It's always a good idea to crawl your site with something like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider after the removal to make sure.
The other thing to double-check is your referral traffic in Google Analytics and your backlink profile. Between these two you can confirm that you don't have any links pointing to a tag page that's actually sending real traffic. It's unlikely but still worth checking!
-
Hi Chris,
To follow-up on an old post of yours, I'm faced with hundreds of random WordPress tags that our social media person created during the past couple of years. Most of these serve no purpose and do not support a consistent site-wide theme. In my opinion, these just seem to dilute keyword emphasis and make it difficult for Google to know what our site is actually about.
I am seeing dozens of our /tag/ pages in the search results so I know they've been indexed. Last week I blocked the tags from Google using the no index feature within the Yoast plugin for WordPress, however, I'm reluctant to go in and just delete a bunch of tags for fear of generating hundreds of 404 error pages.
Any words of wisdom are appreciated.
Thanks.
Eric
-
There is very little traffic to those category pages and I think deleting them would be best. Thank you for helping out.
Joey
-
Not specifically, no; I think the benefit in this case is simply reducing the number of pages that may have duplicate content. Do you have a means of checking what traffic to those category pages looks like? GA, perhaps?
-
I think he answered it really well. Did you know of any data or examples that support deleting tags and its effect on SEO?
Thank you,
Joey
-
Hi Joey! Did Chris answer your question?
-
Hi Joey,
There are 2 ways you can go about this and it really just depends on the context of your site - ultimately the decision comes down to user experience.
Option A - Remove the tags As you said, you can simply remove the tags and be done with it all. It's a clean and simple solution that removes that duplication quickly.
If those tags don't really serve any purpose, this is going to be the best route. If you've only got a small number of blog and/or they're all around the same basic topic, there's no need to be dealing with those tag pages and chewing up precious crawl budget. Analytics is your friend on this one - are people actually visiting those tag pages?
Option B - Tidy up and have faith in the search engines This option is far more time-intensive but necessary if those tags are actually serving a purpose. In this instance, do the usual tidying up like making sure you're only displaying snippets of each post, you don't have redundant tag pages (e.g. tags for Onsite SEO, SEO Onsite Elements and Onsite) etc and I generally suggest avoiding or at least cutting down on pagination where you can as well. There's no need to have only 10 snippets per tag page if you're got ~100 posts in each - all this does is frustrate mobile users and give you 10 pages for that tag while taking up that crawl budget as well.
Search engines do a pretty good job these days of understanding how these pages come about and what purpose they serve so as long as they're not blatantly spammy and are tidy enough, you're generally going to be safe. You could block them via robots.txt if you're really worried about it though I personally don't bother.
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
-
Robot.txt file issue on wordpress site.
I m facing the issue with robot.txt file on my blog. Two weeks ago i done some development work on my blog. I just added few pages in robot file. Now my complete site seems to be blocked. I have checked and update the file and still having issue. The search result shows that "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." Any suggestion to over come with this issue
On-Page Optimization | | Mustansar0 -
Noindex or canonical tag for products which have no unique product description?
I have several ecommerce sites in the same niche and there are a high number of products shared among these sites. I understand that having unique product descriptions for each site may be ideal, but for several reasons this is not an option for the short term. Sales-wise it would be useful to continue products on several sites at the same time. Also it would not be a problem if only the product pages of our main store would show up in the google index. I thought about adding noindex xrobots tag to avoid that product pages are indexed in more than one store to avoid issues with duplicated or thin content or would you implement canonical tag here? What would you suggest?
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Should I include a meta description for my tags on posts
Hi Our crawl report detects that we have not put in a meta description for any of the tags we have used on our blog. (total tag words we have used is around 70). We have however, put a full description of each of our categories, do we really need to put a description for each of the tags we use? Will this really help us with SEO? Also can tags on posts be the same as the keyword your trying to rank the post/article about? For further information We are using Yoast.
On-Page Optimization | | lethalmarketing0 -
Photon for Wordpress experience
Has anyone tried switching on the Photon for Wordpress CDN/image caching feature? If so, did you experience any problems and have you noticed any improvements?
On-Page Optimization | | pugh0 -
How do I do a 301 Redirect in Wordpress
I have several pages that are showing up as "duplicate" on my Wordpress based site based upon the structure of site. I was wondering how to do a 301 redirect for these pages
On-Page Optimization | | SteveSweat0 -
Meta tag "revisit after" - useful?
Hi everybody, I've rarely seen the "revisit after" meta tag during the last 1,5 years. As some of my current client websites are still using it and I'm not sure, if it's still usefull/has any effect, I'd like to hear from the community. Any advices/hints/experiences with the tag? Thanks in advance and cheers from Germany Sven
On-Page Optimization | | targi420 -
Title Tag Over Optimization
Hey, I've read that adding the company name to the title tag was a waste of space since the more words the less weight each one has, with all this over optimization preventive measures, should I rewrite the title tags format with company names? and if so should it be (company name): (naturally organized keywords) (naturally organized keyword) | (Company name). or can I keep it just naturally organized keywords Also I used to do (keyphrase) - (keyphrase) instead of commas, should I fix this? I asked this question on Randy's post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday but didn't really get an answer. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nrv0 -
Potential Duplicate Title Tags On Sibling Pages
Edit I'll take the fall on this one, seems I could have asked my quesiton in a more clear manner. I was cruising other questions and finding a whole of answers that I suspect were not truly intended to help, but maybe help and earn Mozpoints. Wasn't fair of me to label those answering here with that. I will work better on the wording of my questions! 🙂 Edit Either I am asking my question poorly or I am learning there may be a rush to get points by throwing up any old answer...it very well may be the former which I am open to feedback on. Each page is to stand alone and hopefully rank well for the neighbourhood name and in conjunction with another relevant keyword phrase. There is no 'duplicate' version of any pages. * On a site there are numerous pages that provide real estate listings broken down by neighbourhood. Each containing similar content, a abbreviated version of the listings, often spanning 2 or 3 pages. These are 3rd level pages. Properties->Calgary Neighbourhoods->Evanston The title tags created are: Evanston Homes For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Panorama Hills Home For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Etc. for about 15 or so pages. Then they start again for another area of the city: Sagewood Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate Woodside Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate At this point there is no text on the actual page outside of the listings...an example of similar listings on another site - http://www.experiencerealtygroup.com/BaturynandDunluceHomes.ubr Do you think the SE's will see these as 'proper' use of the Title Tag or duplicate or other practices they tend to frown upon? It is a logical way of creating the title and obviously creating a unique version for each page would not only be tough to scale on some sites with 100's of these pages, they would become a little silly and not much use to the searcher in the SERPs Thanks for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | kyegrace1