Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?

[Striventa]

Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical.

Thank you so much!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hey!

Usually tag pages are pretty useless and they could be removed if they don't provide any additional information. In your case I would make sure to see if there is any overlap between tags and categories and accordingly to that remove the tags. You could use the canonical tags, but that's mostly putting band aid on something that is fundamentally broken I'd say.

Martijn.

[SergioB1717]

Hello!

Here is a link about the topic: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/categories-vs-tags-seo-best-practices-which-one-is-better/

You can check it and edit your website with the advices

[Striventa]

Thank you so much, Martijn! I appreciate the reply. I will go ahead and give this a go because this is a mess and needs to be cleaned up.

[LoganRay]

Sounds like you're probably using WP, if so, I'd highly recommend this plugin to handle your category and tag pages. I made the same observation you did not too long ago and went on a mission to figure out the best solution, and noindexing these pages with that plugin is what I came up with.

[Nigel_Carr]

I always no index tags but keep categories. Then add unique content to each category heading to help with SEO. Some WP themes display the content, others don't. The problem with tags is they have a habit of appending themselves to all versions of a page so explode useless and low content pages.

It would take an age to caonicalise tags on most sites so in my opinion they are essentially worthless. You can always use MOZ to check the page ranks before deciding.

[OBIAnalytics]

I have a related question to this - I have used the Yoast SEO plugin in WP to set all tags, categories and date sorts to noindex for the reasons most have stated here. However, now MOZ flags me with 1.7k meta index warnings because of it. Since it was intentional, anyone know of a way to turn off this warning in MOZ?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Obi

Yes - a rather annoying new feature of MOZ which says that a noindex is an error when it clearly isn't. You have done exactly the right thing to avoid a ton of duplicate content. Just ignore the warnings.

I can understand the ethos - but are you going to go through thousands of tags and canonicalise them? no, me neither. I have seen huge success no indexing tags on massive websites. It instantly sorts out the problem and frankly I never even click on tags - they just take up space in Google for no reason.

Regards

Nigel