Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?

[howlusa]

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?

[wissamdandan]

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

[RobertFisher]

Wissam

Thanks for the most excellent link to the John Mueller post. I learned something new today thanks to you.

Best,

Robert

[evolvingSEO]

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

[howlusa]

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?

[evolvingSEO]

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

[howlusa]

This post is deleted!

[howlusa]

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?

[evolvingSEO]

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!

[Dan-Louis]

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?

[evolvingSEO]

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!