Tags - Good or bad for SEO

[Christinaa]

We are getting Moz errors for duplicate content because tag pages share the same blog posts. Is there any way to fix this? Are these errors bad for SEO, or can I simply disregard these and ignore them?

We are also getting Moz errors for missing descriptions on tag pages. I am unsure how to fix these errors, as we do not actually have pages for these on our WordPress site where we are able to put in a description.

I have heard that having tags can be good for SEO? (We don't mind having several links that show up when searching for us on google...) As far as the SEO goes, I am not sure what to do. Does anyone know the best strategy?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Taxonomies: Categories and Tags

Implementing categories and tags on your website is an important way to add structure to it. These taxonomies group content on a certain topic. When used properly, Google will understand the structure of your site better.

Categories have a hierarchical structure. There can be subcategories within categories. Tags do not have a hierarchical structure. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content means that the same content is shown in multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you’ll get the content you came for. But it confuses a search engine: it has to pick which one to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice.

Above that, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, and others link to the second URL. If these duplicates were all linking to the same URL, your chance of ranking in the top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher.

The solution for duplicate content is a so-called canonical link. A canonical link tells the search engines: yes, this content is duplicate, and this one is the original content.

Structure of your website...why? The importance of site structure for SEO
The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this:

1 - A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.

The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good structure could, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

2 - A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.

On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics. Let's take an example you have a recipes website and you want to create a structure for your website. So you several recipes on your website and you have several categories such as Italian recipes, French recipes, Mexican recipes and so on. On the other hand, your tags can be used in another approach such as breakfast, dinner, lunch, low cab ect on this way you do not compete with your own content resulting in higher rankings.

So how to fix your errors?

1 - Add title, meta-description and canonical tags to your tag pages.
if you are using WordPress is pretty easy to do it. You just need to install Yoast SEO plugin and check one by one all your tag pages

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