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
-
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Putting Dates In Title Tag
Hi, I have a site were I write previews for sports match ups. I notice when I don't put the date in the title I rank much better for specific keywords. I also noticed that most people don't really put in the date when they do the search anyways, especially since google does a good job of showing the most recent pages anyways. The only reason I continue to put the date is because of this whole idea of not having page titles that are duplicate. So many of our games will be Team A vs Team B Preview, and Im worried that the term "preview" will become so repetitive that google may not like it. Any tips or ideas on how to approach this issue best? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz1 -
Does a UTM tag influence the linkvalue?
Will Google value a link with a UTM tag the same as a clean link without a UTM tag? I should say that a UTM tag link is not a natural link so the linkvalue is zero. Anyone any idea how to look at this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
Meta tags - are they case sensitive?
I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages, I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Accidently added a nofollow, noindex tag and then...
Hey guys, My first post here and ironically highlights a ridiculously stupid mistake! Ok, here's the deal... I started building links to one of my new page on a fairly good, old site (DA = >35). Before starting to build links, I added fresh new content, and while doing that, I accidentally added a "nofollow" and "noindex" tag to the page! Guess what, google DID de-index the page ! So the questions is (and YES, I did change the meta tags): Will google re-index the page with some good linking? Will it treat the page as a new, fresh page even though it was present for over a year? I had already started link building to that page, and now technically the links are pointing to a page that does not exist in the index, so once it does get re-indexed, will Google FLAG it as having too many links? Would I be ranking it as a new page? Will its previous ranking (for very few keywords) will come back? Thanks and Regards, Amod
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bonusjonathan0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0 -
How does a canonical work and is it necessary to also have a no index, follow tag in place?
Across our site, we have canonical tags in place for URLs that contain duplicate content and for URLs without a trailing slash since we are using URLs WITH a trailing slash for all URLs across our site. We also recently added a no index, follow tag to all non-canonical URLs since we noticed a high number of duplicate content URLs in Google Webmaster Tools. The first part of my question is: How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present? The second part of my question is: Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content? And lastly, if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order? Canonical tag first then no index, follow tag second or no index, follow tag first then canonical tag second? I would appreciate any insight you can give. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0 -
Should I prevent Google from indexing blog tag and category pages?
I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers0