Should I disable the indexing of tags in Wordpress?

[JCN-SBWD]

Hi,

I have a client that is publishing 7 or 8 news articles and posts each month. I am optimising selected posts and I have found that they have been adding a lot of tags (almost like using hashtags) .

There are currently 29 posts but already 55 tags, each of which has its own archive page, and all of which are added to the site map to be indexed (https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/sitemap_index.xml).

I came across an article (https://crunchify.com/better-dont-use-wordpress-tags/) that suggested that tags add no value to SEO ranking, and as a consequence Wordpress tags should not be indexed or included in the sitemap.

I haven't been able to find much more reliable information on this topic, so my question is - should I get rid of the tags from this website and make the focus pages, posts and categories (redirecting existing tag pages back to the site home page)?

It is a relatively new websites and I am conscious of the fact that category and tag archive pages already substantially outnumber actual content pages (posts and news) - I guess this isn't optimal.

I'd appreciate any advice.

Thanks

wMfojBf

[effectdigital]

Personally I usually do this as well as robots.txt blocking them to save on crawl allowance, but you should no-index first as if Google is blocked from crawling (robots.txt) then how will they find the no-index tags? So it needs to be staggered

I find that the tag URLs result in quite messy SERPs so I prefer to de-index those and then really focus on adding value to 'actual' category URLs. Because categories have a defined structure they're better for SEO (IMO)

Categories are usually good for SEO if you tune and tweak them up (and if their architecture is linear) but tags are very messy

[JCN-SBWD]

Many thanks for the prompt response and also for confirming my suspicions, it is much appreciated.

The robots suggestion is handy too.

[jahws]

This post is deleted!

[rasaho]

NO, I am still getting some traffic from tags. So why did you want to ruin that

[David1122]

Can you please explain what exactly you do.

[bankiu]

It’s a good idea to block tags, since they are duplicate content and may dilute the performance of your real pages. But if you find certain tag or author pages bring valid traffic, you can make an exception for them. It's up to you

[Seotools096]

I would recommend to disable tags indexing as there are cases where you are multiple tags for same topic. You can index categories as mentioned above that they are more structure and define your website in some way. If you write custom excerpt for each post, it helps categories to have unique content  for each post except.