Seomoz.org Category and Tags practice

[antorome]

Hello,

I have been checking seomoz sourcecode and architecture these days in order to learn and to apply it in my site but I havent managed to find "tags" at all. Just the "Posts by Categories" on the right sidebar. Is this the only way you are categorising content?

In this case, the only way spiders have to find your content is via these category archive pages and the general sitemap?

Thanks!

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Antonio,

You're correct - we don't currently use tag pages.  We rely on our site map, category archive pages, and inbound links to surface up content, and this is working pretty well for us (in part because we have such an active community who share and tweet and post about our content, so we have a solid external link foundation).

With as much content as we have, I would be hesitant to add tags as an added layer of complexity, as it would be difficult to scale.  For one thing, these pages wouldn't have any unique content, which is already a problem with our category pages.  For another, we already have some categories that don't get posted in too regularly - adding tag pages would increase the number of pages in the /blog folder that have no unique content and don't get updated regularly. Finally, our users seem to be able to drill down into our content as needed just fine, so there's no added user benefit.

Our site is a big, old site and has a lot of the same problems a big, old site has.  I wouldn't necessarily use us as the example of what to do or not do on your own site.  If you feel that tag pages would add a user benefit to your blog, I say go for it - but in my opinion, they're often unnecessary.

[antorome]

Thanks for the complete answer!

I also have an old site with around 1000 posts and also around 4000 products and just use categories. It is quite difficult to arrange everything and I was wondering how do you do it.

In fact you just have categories in sidebar and then "sections" in the main menu so user can nav in your site.

As I see it, the important thing is usability and easing the navigation. "urls" dont mind so much.

Thanks again