Who uses WordPress Tags anymore?

[WilliamBay]

Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags.

I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi William!

Yeah, I still use them, mainly to supplement the content on the site. I dont allow the tags to get indexed though. It's a tad spammy for the standards we have nowadays. I've seen/worked on fashion blogs that spam tags (innocently) with no penalties but I've seen great improvements in results after tweaking them and making it noindex (sacrificing impressions, based on the webmaster tools, but overall, great for actual ranking pages)

[Antony_Towle]

William,

We don't use them after using them incorrectly in the past alongside categories and archives all fully indexed,

We now use categories only for post grouping content and navigation, category feed indexed as normal with tags taxonomies set to no index, follow within Yoast SEO to avoid any duplicate content issues,

Hope my view helps a little,

James

[DanielFreedman]

Maybe I'm missing something -- but I've never seen the benefit of tags to the end-user (at least as most site authors use them.)

Tags are often displayed and authors often over tag. Many authors confuse tags with SEO page titles and come up with really bad ones. They also confuse tags with categories.

I've tried and failed in the past to educate multi-author sites on the distinction between all these.

Again, maybe I'm missing something -- but I just don't see tags as that important in the grand scheme of things.

I focus my attention on ensuring posts are done in accordance with a regular schedule on agreed-upon topics in agreed-upon categories. We display by category, recency, and popularity. So who needs tags?