Wordpress Tags and Catagories

[JoeyGedgaud]

I am looking for data in regards to Wordpress and blog tags and categories. Wordpress has these identifies in there tool, but I see them being used less and less. Wordpress also creates annoying pages and duplicate content errors when using tags. Should I remove these tags and categories to improve SEO?

I am also wondering if anyone has noticed a difference in user experience and traffic when changing these.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Joey,

There are 2 ways you can go about this and it really just depends on the context of your site - ultimately the decision comes down to user experience.

Option A - Remove the tags As you said, you can simply remove the tags and be done with it all. It's a clean and simple solution that removes that duplication quickly.

If those tags don't really serve any purpose, this is going to be the best route. If you've only got a small number of blog and/or they're all around the same basic topic, there's no need to be dealing with those tag pages and chewing up precious crawl budget. Analytics is your friend on this one - are people actually visiting those tag pages?

Option B - Tidy up and have faith in the search engines This option is far more time-intensive but necessary if those tags are actually serving a purpose. In this instance, do the usual tidying up like making sure you're only displaying snippets of each post, you don't have redundant tag pages (e.g. tags for Onsite SEO, SEO Onsite Elements and Onsite) etc and I generally suggest avoiding or at least cutting down on pagination where you can as well. There's no need to have only 10 snippets per tag page if you're got ~100 posts in each - all this does is frustrate mobile users and give you 10 pages for that tag while taking up that crawl budget as well.

Search engines do a pretty good job these days of understanding how these pages come about and what purpose they serve so as long as they're not blatantly spammy and are tidy enough, you're generally going to be safe. You could block them via robots.txt if you're really worried about it though I personally don't bother.

[MattRoney]

Hi Joey! Did Chris answer your question?

[JoeyGedgaud]

I think he answered it really well. Did you know of any data or examples that support deleting tags and its effect on SEO?

Thank you,

Joey

[MattRoney]

Not specifically, no; I think the benefit in this case is simply reducing the number of pages that may have duplicate content. Do you have a means of checking what traffic to those category pages looks like? GA, perhaps?

[JoeyGedgaud]

There is very little traffic to those category pages and I think deleting them would be best. Thank you for helping out.

Joey

[EricFish]

Hi Chris,

To follow-up on an old post of yours, I'm faced with hundreds of random WordPress tags that our social media person created during the past couple of years. Most of these serve no purpose and do not support a consistent site-wide theme. In my opinion, these just seem to dilute keyword emphasis and make it difficult for Google to know what our site is actually about.

I am seeing dozens of our /tag/ pages in the search results so I know they've been indexed. Last week I blocked the tags from Google using the no index feature within the Yoast plugin for WordPress, however, I'm reluctant to go in and just delete a bunch of tags for fear of generating hundreds of 404 error pages.

Any words of wisdom are appreciated.

Thanks.

Eric

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Eric,

Without having too much info to work from, it does sound like you're on the right track here. If the tags aren't really serving a purpose there's no reason to have them junking up your site with duplicates.

If those tags are removed correctly they won't generate 404s because nothing should be linking to them. The only way you might end up with an internal 404 through removing them is if you've linked directly to them in your content.

It's always a good idea to crawl your site with something like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider after the removal to make sure.

The other thing to double-check is your referral traffic in Google Analytics and your backlink profile. Between these two you can confirm that you don't have any links pointing to a tag page that's actually sending real traffic. It's unlikely but still worth checking!