WordPress Tags and SEO

[donsilvernail]

Good Morning everyone,

I am trying to decide how I am going to handle an issue on two WordPress websites.

I recently acquired 2 new clients that used to do business with the same SEO company. Neither of the clients know of the other but both had the same story about said SEO company. The usual complaints, I wont get into details.

My issue is the old SEO company basically was spamming keywords and utilized tags to do this.

For each of these clients they had very thin spammy blog posts written and then had a multitude of spammy tags used as keywords here is an example

https://captainjacksboatingschool.com/middlesex-county-boating-safety-class/

Each one of these tags is creating duplicate content. How do i properly handle these tags? Do i delete? Do i need to redirect into one main page after deletion. I much rather use plain English and authoritative based Categories. In fact I never use tags, only categories. They do not seem to have much seo value.

Both clients who were with this company have the same Tag setup... Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I do not want to loose the customers current rank because i want to do things my way

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

[iQi]

Hi,

I personally think you should only allow Google to index tags if you have a big number of posts that use these tags organically, not for keyword stuffing and spammy activities.

In the case you mentioned, I would disallow Search Engines from indexing tag pages. And if you believe that these tags should not be on that website, then you should delete them. Looking at the example URL you sent, its clearly created in the attempt to trick Google.

I would start first with disallowing search engines from indexing them, then I would go head and slowly remove these tags.

If you have posts that are not 100% relevant to the business and are high quality, consider removing those too. This particular page is not doing well really from linking or authority point of view. See the image I attached

I hope this helps.

S0MucPO

[donsilvernail]

This is essentially what i was thinking too.

i was hoping to get a few more responses from the community, but i value your input. I have already started moving in this direction.

Thank you,