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
-
Should I exclude my knowledge center subdomain from indexing?
We have a very large Knowledge center that is indexed. Is there any reason I should not exclude this subdomain from indexing? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NikCall2 -
Proper Title Tags for ecommerce
In terms of E-commerce title tags. We are a manufacturer of our own clothing products. We are new to the SEO landscape so if this question is an obvious answer, then i apologize for wasting any one times in advance. We Manufacture our own clothing. Each item has a name. The names are American womens names such as amanda or lori or jenniffer etc. When we create the title tag for them should we include the name of the item itself at the beginning or end. For example should it be Item Name - Keyword - Keyword - Brand Name(aka manufacturer) or Keyword - Keyword - Item Name - Brand Name (aka manufacturer) The reason we ask this is because we think it would be a waste to rank for actual American names such as Jennifer and Jessica. All that we have read on Moz suggests that it seems to be better to have pertinent keywords in the beginning of the title as opposed to the end. In terms of our brand name we already rank number 1 for every combination of our brand. So we would like to start picking up traffic for the different product types we sell and there respective synonyms. Not sure if i am making any sense. Sorry in advance, and any help is very very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Imagination0 -
Pages Titles in SERPs - Wordpress Site
In Google SERPs we have several websites (built in wordpress) who's pages are being displayed without using the page title - is this google ignoring the page title or is there a problem in our code - also if this is google is it still taking notice of the page title to determine what content is on the page?I have read several articles on this but wondered if someone can advise - I can provide the URL if required.Also I wanted to 100% that our robots.txt is behaving its self.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Certain Product Pages Not Indexing
Hey All, We discovered an issue where new product pages on our site were not getting indexed because a "noindex" tag was inadvertently being added to section when those pages were created. We removed the noindex tag in late April and some of the pages that had not been previously indexed are now showing up, but others are still not getting indexed and I'd appreciate some help on why this could be. Here is an example of a page that was not in the index but is now showing after removal of noindex: http://www.cloud9living.com/san-diego/gaslamp-quarter-food-tour And here is an example of a page that is still not showing in the index: http://www.cloud9living.com/atlanta/race-a-ferrari UPDATE: The above page is now showing after I manually submitted it in WMT. I had previously submitted another page like a month ago and it was still not indexing so I thought the manual submission was a dead end. However, it just so happens that the above URL just had its Page Title and H1 updated to something more specific and less duplicative so I am currently running a test to see if that's the problem with these pages not indexing. Will update this soon. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GManSEO0 -
No index.no follow certain pages
Hi, I want to stop Google et al from finding a some pages within my website. the url is www.mywebsite.com/call_backrequest.php?rid=14 As these pages are creating a lot of duplicate content issues. Would the easiest solution be to place a 'Nofollow/Noindex' META tag in page www.mywebsite.com/call_backrequest.php many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wood1e19680 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0