Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I disable the indexing of tags in Wordpress?
-
Hi,
I have a client that is publishing 7 or 8 news articles and posts each month. I am optimising selected posts and I have found that they have been adding a lot of tags (almost like using hashtags) .
There are currently 29 posts but already 55 tags, each of which has its own archive page, and all of which are added to the site map to be indexed (https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/sitemap_index.xml).
I came across an article (https://crunchify.com/better-dont-use-wordpress-tags/) that suggested that tags add no value to SEO ranking, and as a consequence Wordpress tags should not be indexed or included in the sitemap.
I haven't been able to find much more reliable information on this topic, so my question is - should I get rid of the tags from this website and make the focus pages, posts and categories (redirecting existing tag pages back to the site home page)?
It is a relatively new websites and I am conscious of the fact that category and tag archive pages already substantially outnumber actual content pages (posts and news) - I guess this isn't optimal.
I'd appreciate any advice.
Thanks
-
Yes it would be best if you were the tags option off, It excellent performance working for example Shillong Teer Club chart
-
Disabling the indexing of tags in WordPress can be beneficial for SEO purposes, as it prevents search engines from indexing individual tag pages, which may otherwise lead to duplicate content issues. However, whether to disable tag indexing depends on your specific website goals and content structure. If you use tags sparingly and they add value to your site's organization, leaving them indexed may be beneficial. Evaluate your SEO strategy and content structure to determine the best approach for your WordPress site.
-
I'm having the same problem right now, my site is fairly new but it was already receiving some organic traffic then, all of a sudden traffic sank like a brick and i can't find the answer why.
Only thing that changed was adding tags to blog posts which i think might be creating duplicate content so I'm proceeding to disable those, will leave categories alive for the moment because they were bringing traffic but if nothing changes after it will deindex them as well, site in question is sluthpass hope i can recover traffic after disabling those annoying tags.
-
Hello experts, I have disabled the tags but it is still showing in Google. What should I do now? Here you can check redeemcodecenter.com, Thanks in Advance.
-
If you have a large number of tags that don't add clear value to your site's content, disabling tag indexing in WordPress can be beneficial for search engine optimization. However, if your tags are well-curated and provide meaningful navigation for your users, enabling indexing can improve discoverability and site organization. Evaluate the relevance and usefulness of your tags, considering both SEO considerations and user experience before making a decision.
-
I experienced the same problem. I once read an article that Google prefers websites that have a neat structure. and in my opinion, it is difficult to make tags more structured on my website. my site is malasngoding.com . what do you think?
-
Even i was also looking the answer for same for my website https://abcya.in/ i think tags should not be indexed.
-
I don't think it's a good idea. I'm testing tons of articles with and without tags for my website, Dizzibooster. It seems that adding tags will provide an edge for indexing purposes. However, you can test these things yourself."
-
I am facing the same issue on my website AmazingFactsHindi. As per our expert discussion and after reading this forum, I decided to de-index all the Tags and Category pages that are creating duplicate issues on our website.
-
We had similar questions on SEO. We experimented with disabling tags for the last 4 weeks. The only impact so far, I was able to find is that the [thecodebuzz(https://www.thecodebuzz.com/) website did not get hits for a few impressions which were based on tags keys. We are still evaluating the impact.
-
Heyo,
If your tags and categories are providing value to your users or helping with your site's SEO, you might not want to remove them from search engine indexes. I disabled it on my site OceanXD, And it was a good decision for me. -
I have a same question but I have found blocking category and tag is good for SEO.
I have blogsite Tech News Blog I have crated around 400 tag but I have seen this was crating duplicate issue.My personal opinion tag and category de index will be better for SEO.
-
@JCN-SBWD You can index your tags in as much as it doesn't affect the indexing of your posts. Tags do get traffic as well. The only reason why I stopped indexing my tags is because it affects the indexing of my post. Tags got indexed in a matter of minutes while it takes hours, sometimes days before my posts get indexed.
-
I would recommend to disable tags indexing as there are cases where you are multiple tags for same topic. You can index categories as mentioned above that they are more structure and define your website in some way. If you write custom excerpt for each post, it helps categories to have unique content for each post except.
-
It’s a good idea to block tags, since they are duplicate content and may dilute the performance of your real pages. But if you find certain tag or author pages bring valid traffic, you can make an exception for them. It's up to you
-
Can you please explain what exactly you do.
-
-
Many thanks for the prompt response and also for confirming my suspicions, it is much appreciated.
The robots suggestion is handy too.
-
Personally I usually do this as well as robots.txt blocking them to save on crawl allowance, but you should no-index first as if Google is blocked from crawling (robots.txt) then how will they find the no-index tags? So it needs to be staggered
I find that the tag URLs result in quite messy SERPs so I prefer to de-index those and then really focus on adding value to 'actual' category URLs. Because categories have a defined structure they're better for SEO (IMO)
Categories are usually good for SEO if you tune and tweak them up (and if their architecture is linear) but tags are very messy
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
-
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa1 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
How to do Country specific indexing ?
We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries Can someone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozil0 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Should I remove the ?replytocom variables in wordpress?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it. Here's the site if you need to see it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0