Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
-
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!
-
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
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Translating meta tags using WPML and AIO SEO
Having a heck of a time finding info on this one... We're working on a multilingual website which uses WPML. I've used the All in One SEO plugin to customize meta data (title, description, etc). These strings do not appear in the list of translations in WPML. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? How do you enable WPML to translate meta data set via the AIO plugin? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc0 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
Too many on page links
Hi I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+ How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Proper Title Tags for ecommerce
In terms of E-commerce title tags. We are a manufacturer of our own clothing products. We are new to the SEO landscape so if this question is an obvious answer, then i apologize for wasting any one times in advance. We Manufacture our own clothing. Each item has a name. The names are American womens names such as amanda or lori or jenniffer etc. When we create the title tag for them should we include the name of the item itself at the beginning or end. For example should it be Item Name - Keyword - Keyword - Brand Name(aka manufacturer) or Keyword - Keyword - Item Name - Brand Name (aka manufacturer) The reason we ask this is because we think it would be a waste to rank for actual American names such as Jennifer and Jessica. All that we have read on Moz suggests that it seems to be better to have pertinent keywords in the beginning of the title as opposed to the end. In terms of our brand name we already rank number 1 for every combination of our brand. So we would like to start picking up traffic for the different product types we sell and there respective synonyms. Not sure if i am making any sense. Sorry in advance, and any help is very very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Imagination0 -
Meta tags - are they case sensitive?
I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages, I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
H2 Tag Backlink - is this safe?
I have found that my site is getting a link from a good site, but my concern is that the link is in a H2 tag in the footer of the front page of the site Would getting a link from a site wrapped in H2 tags be safe? The anchor is my sites brand name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order?
The question is in the title: Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order? For example, using them in order: H1, H2, H3... etc. Or is it OK to have H2 tags before the main H1 tag on a page? - for example sidebar content with H2 headings before the main content H1 tag? Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640