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.
Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
-
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
-
Hey Dan
Ha! Yes a lot changes but this is one thing that has stayed consistent - it's still totally fine to delete old tags. They will result in a 404, but those 404s are generally harmless!
-
8 years later, I learned something. Solid. Very solid. Thank you for sharing the knowledge, Dan!
8 years however is an eternity in the world of SEO. Are there any updates on your stance re. this problem in particular?
Following your guide and generating reports to put them in the "Nay"-bag, I want to delete them. I'm going to remove them from index first by nofollowing the tags taxonomy, and removing from XML sitemap.
So, the big "What if" ... What if I simply delete all of them after doing so?
-
Maybe 35 of them?
You can just leave those 35 indexed then.
I would just really like to get rid of most of them. It's so cluttered! Tags make up for nearly 60% of my site. That's no good.
Bear in mind you can delete from being visible in site navigation (remove tag clouds, tags from footers, tags at bottoms of posts) but the tag archives will still actually exist. So you can remove the links on-site without actually deleting the pages.
Like you siad in your posts, tag archives can be thin and Google is not down with that. I want to merge the tags with that Yoast Term Optmizer tool but it isn't available anymore
I'm worried about doing redirects because that is a lot of redirects!
If you remove tags from on-page links and noindex the ones that aren't bringing traffic that should solve things. 35 redirects for the rest that are bringing traffic is not too many
I also have a question on categories. I currently have three categories each with 12 subcategories. The subcategories are city names. (I work for a bar that has 12 locations). Is that bad form? Would you set it up differently? And if I have a category named nightlife and a subcategory under it named Baltimore, should i check them both for a Baltimore nightlife post or just the Baltimore part?
I would think about how often you'll post in each category. What you don't want is a category with only a post or two sitting in it for months or years. If you think, after a year, each category and sub category will have say 7-10+ posts in it, than it should be fine. It's all about having each category archive be full of content and unique!
-
Maybe 35 of them? I would just really like to get rid of most of them. It's so cluttered! Tags make up for nearly 60% of my site. That's no good. Like you siad in your posts, tag archives can be thin and Google is not down with that. I want to merge the tags with that Yoast Term Optmizer tool but it isn't available anymore
I'm worried about doing redirects because that is a lot of redirects!
I also have a question on categories. I currently have three categories each with 12 subcategories. The subcategories are city names. (I work for a bar that has 12 locations). Is that bad form? Would you set it up differently? And if I have a category named nightlife and a subcategory under it named Baltimore, should i check them both for a Baltimore nightlife post or just the Baltimore part?
-
Hey There
The post suggests keeping specific tags that are receiving traffic indexed. You can do this on a tag by tag basis with Yoast. The post also does not recommend deleting tags, just noindexing them.
I would suggest keeping tags that are bringing the most traffic indexed, while just noindexing the rest. Do not delete them. Out of your 1,000+ tags - how many are responsible for the 700+ visits?
There's also the option to 301 redirect tags to the most relevant post or category. But again, I would only do this with tags that aren't bringing substantial traffic.
-Dan
-
Dan,
I read your post and did all the spreadsheet stuff and I am still hesitant to noindex my tags. My blog has 321 posts with 1,240 tags. I understand that this is way too many and that I need to cut down. However, I am worried about losing the traffic I am getting from these tags, especially if I noindex them as you suggest.
About 3% of my monthly non-paid search traffic is coming from these tags. The bounce rate is 55%, which is only slightly greater than the site average. So on average monthly, about 715 people come in from the tags without bouncing, which is a little over 2% of my total non-bounce traffic. While it is only 2%, it is still a good amount of people. I don't want to lose this traffic. If I delete these tags and noindex the remainders, how can I expect to recover for this traffic?
-
Fortunately I predicted this question a year and nineteen days ago: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/
No seriously, you just want to run that analysis to make sure you're not killing a random tag or two with some traffic or links. In which case you can selectively delete and/or noindex.
-Dan
-
Wissam
Thanks for the most excellent link to the John Mueller post. I learned something new today thanks to you.
Best,
Robert
-
I wont worry about them, its totally fine to have 404 errors ... make sure you dont have any quality links pointing to these pages ( i dnt think there will be ) . but other than that dont worry about it
On another note, please check this G+ Post from John Mueller (Googler)
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm
hope it helps
cheers
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
404 errors
Hi I am getting these show up in WMT crawl error any help would be very much appreciated | ?escaped_fragment=Meditation-find-peace-within/csso/55991bd90cf2efdf74ec3f60 | 404 | 12/5/15 |
Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve
| | 2 | mobile/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
| | 3 | ?escaped_fragment=Tips-for-a-balanced-lifestyle/csso/1 | 404 | 12/1/15 |
| | 4 | ?escaped_fragment=My-favorite-yoga-spot/csso/5598e2130cf2585ebcde3b9a | 404 | 12/1/15 |
| | 5 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6 | 404 | 11/29/15 |
| | 6 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Tag/yoga | 404 | 11/30/15 |
| | 7 | ?escaped_fragment=Inhale-exhale-and-once-again/csso/2 | 404 | 11/27/15 |
| | 8 | ?escaped_fragment=classes/covl | 404 | 10/29/15 |
| | 9 | m/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
| | 10 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Page/1 | 404 | 11/30/15 | | |0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Removing Media from Wordpress
I've run the seomoz on page report and found an interesting issue. I'm using wordpress and it seems that every picture I add to my articles seem to be added as separate pages to the site. I'm having to go to each and every picture and creating a meta tag and description to it. I still get duplicate content issues with the same. On my Disqus system, I get the same pictures added just as a page or article would look like. What can I do to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | emasaa0 -
Authorship and Publisher on WordPress
I successfully enabled rel=publisher on our WordPress blog, and as a test I also enabled rel=authorship for a set of blog posts. (Tested both in Google's Rich Snippets Tester.) However, on the individual blog posts the publisher credit disappears. Is there a way to enable both to appear on blog posts?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.
I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!
Technical SEO | | AZWebWorks0 -
Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Leighm0