WP Permalinks, categories, and organic ranking impact

[MindSpark]

Hello.  this is my first post here, so I hope it to be a question with an easy answer...

I am working on a site that has an established domain, but has recently suffered significant ranking decline.  one of the problems I have found involves over-use of categories and tags - making the actual content 3 to 4 clicks deep within any given post URL.

My question involves the restructuring of category / tag use for improved page content and SEO organic rank impact.  Here is an example:

domain.com/blue-shoes/blue-shoes-tampa

I want to target this specific post and optimize for "blue shoes tampa".  I have used the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast to help achieve balanced optimization on the on-page post content itself, but now am struggling with the best approach for the URL...

also, the site has about 80 (62 posts and 18 pages) total items with similar issues, , so I am hoping that any answer / opinion offered here might also be applicable to the rest of the site.

thanks in advance for your time & comments.

[pattersonla]

What has worked best in the WP world for me is always sticking with a www.somedomain.com/{category}/{page}. This seems along the lines of what you have shown with domain.com/blue-shoes/blue-shoes-tampa. I like this permalink structure.

Definitely avoid going too deep: www.somedomain.com/clothing/lowerbody/feet/shoes/blue-shoes-tampa

And avoid being too repetitive: www.blue-shoes.com/blue-shoes/blue-shoes

Other than that, I think you are on the right track.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yeah, stick with either:

/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%postname%/

Personally, I like %postname% but if you don't plan on adding new posts, you might be better off taking some time and choosing the perfect category slugs to give you bonus keywords in the URL.

[benjaminspak]

If the keyword you want to target is already in your URL and Title it's spammy to do it if in the category as well.

domain.com/blue-shoes/blue-shoes-tampa

Flat structure such as /%postname%/ gets you indexed faster.

Never use tags - you will be creating too many link paths, and on page links, which devalues the internal links you do have, such as categories.

[Serpstone]

Been thinking a bit about tags myself.  Time was (not very long ago) when tags were great. They gave alternate page titles and Google never seemed to mind the duplicate content under separate headings.  Add six tags to a post and you got 7 pages indexed essentially, each with meaningful headings.

It does still work, but less so, and I'm noticing a lot of changes with how wordpress behaves in the SERPS now - particularly with new sites.

I used to always write a post about each page I created too and link to it.  So with tags and categories, each page would then be starting out with an extra 10 or so internal links (each tag and category having a different url).  Google used to seem to go "oh, a page with links from 10 other pages... it must be the most important".  Now it goes "huh, what do I do here?  I think the blog post is maybe the most important this week, but I'll try out a tag next week, and hey, lets devalue the page because it has internal links with the same text from multiple pages".

Love to hear your thoughts....

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Patrick

Welcome! Thanks for the question. Everyone else pretty much got you in the right track here. The structure is good. Avoid too much redundancies and avoid too many folders (depth).

I'd like to add that I too feel very strongly about NOT indexing tag archives. If a blog is set up how it WordPress intended, you'd have about 5-8 categories, and an infinite amount of tags. You index the categories, as they act as the main buckets of content, but you don't index tags - because you could end up with 500 tags, and have half of them with only one post in them. Then they look an awful lot like a duplicate of the post. Not to mention tag archives are pretty thin, and Google is returning them much less in the SERPs now.

I had a client with 9,000 (yes... NINE THOUSAND) tags indexed. I zapped em all out of the index and his traffic actually went UP. Not entirely sure if it was due to the tags being removed, but it sure as heck didn't hurt traffic.

Feel free to check out my SEO for WordPress post on Moz as I think it covers a lot of the things you may have questions about.

-Dan

Edit: Ohhh I meant to add... noindex your subpages too.

[evolvingSEO]

Ian

I'd completely agree. As I said to Patrick above, I've been deindexing tag archives like mad on my clients sites, with NO negative consequences, if anything the results are very positive. They're thin pages, with not much going on and often the titles get duped.

Check out this post I did which shows how to safely determine if tag archives can be de-indexed and how to do so.

Noindexing tags of course doesn't prevent Google from crawling them. If they're linked to it can still be good for Google discovering your content.

-Dan

[MindSpark]

Thanks everyone for your comments and insights.  I think given the feedback here coupled with my own thoughts, I will NO INDEX the tags altogether.

That brings up one additional question in my mind, which may be addressed in the 2 posts referenced in this thread by Dan Shure - about how to "disconnect the existing tags".  I'll read through Dan'e posts and update this thread with any noticeable results on the site's page rankings.

Finally, let me just say that as a relatively new member here as well as to being a new "SEO" on my own, I love the robust nature of the SEOMoz tools and the community itself.  In a way, I feel like I have access to very esteemed professors who are leading the planet in this space, not just in evolving this scientific art form, but also in de-mystifying it for newer folks like myself.  So for that, I offer a warm and sincere "THANKS"!