Tags, categories or both?

[jasmin28]

There is so much debate regarding duplicate content, horror stories, losing visitors, being penalized, yada yada... that I am wandering if it's wise to use tags/categories on a WordPress blog.

I saw that all major blogs are using these structuring etiquettes and they are all dofollow and meta robots on index, follow.

What do you say? It is wise to use tags, categories or both? Should I nofollow them, noindex or follow and index? Or noindex follow?

Cheers and thx.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Robert

The best way to think about this is from a user perspective and both categories and tags are useful structures to organise and browse content. So, from a pure user perspective, which is what really matters here, then, yep, use both.

But, you are right in that this can be a problem with WordPress in that it can create so many different taxonomies which are essentially duplicate pages.

If we consider a single user  blog you could have

• homepage
• author page
• tags
• categories
• date archives

All of which can be duplicated or substantially duplicated. If you don't use the read more tool as well this can be made worse.

Fortunately, there is a really easy way to deal with this and the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will pretty much do the job for you. Install that and then just noindex all of your non essential landing pages to keep the uniqueness as high as possible.

Again, much of what you do here depends on how you use the categories. Will you have one parent category that has everything in it or lots of parent categories? Are these landing pages? Could you not build your content and build better landing pages if you no indexed them all?

If you have several categories and articles are only going in one category then by all means index them and try to add some unique content to each one beyond the post previews. Maybe use the excerpt on categories and a snippet on the homepage to keep them even more unique.

Plenty of options, no right or wrong answers, just try to keep the site as unique as possible and the above should give you plenty to be going on with.

Shout if you have any questions!
Marcus