Deleting Tags without Penalty?
-
Hello - We have a site with over 1,000 tags. We added too many and would like a fresh start as they are creating a lot of duplicate pages on the site. What is the best way to go about deleting all of these tags without being penalized by Google? Is there a way to tell Google direclty to stop crawling them? We would prefer to not have that many pages just sit as 404 errors on the site. Thank you.
-
Oh yeah, remove away.
-
I've had a client who spammed on every blogpost like 15 tags or so that grew over time really large. It was best in this case to just remove 'm because they really added zero to the experience of the user.
-
If they are causing you to have duplicate content and there isn't much search traffic going to them, there should be no penalty for removing them. 404s don't ever cause penalties. You can tell Google to stop crawling them though, but it is a time intensive process that is probably not worth your time. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en
If you are deleting and then remaking the tag pages in a different URL structure, I would note which ones are getting organic search traffic and are most used by site visitors. Then when you remake them, put in a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
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
-
Brand page meta tag
I have around 100 brands on my website (with 100 different pages.) Please suggest me best way to create meta tags for all brand pages.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Title tag not showing on google? Please Help!
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.webygeeks.comI have updated title tags of my client's website 10-15 days ago, still the title on google is coming as the company name 😞 Why so??Description is correct but title is incorrect, can you please recommend me something guys?Also, i am wondering why the google cache is showing date of september 5 and we have changed the titles around 10 - 15 days before that http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P45GOiHRaIUJ:www.webygeeks.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk Really appreciate your suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lvp11380 -
Canonical tag refers to itself (???)
Greetings Mozzers. I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous: What I've seen is that on some pages like: www.example.com/page1 There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical" It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential? Cheers Jorge
Technical SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Changing title tag in wordpress media pages
Hello! I have a problem of duplicate title on 59 pages in Worpress. I Guess it happened after a recent WP update, because, suddenly, I got a peak of 59 from zero in a day. The SeoMoz crawl report states that there are 59 duplicate title. As you may see in the picture those are all media pages, whose title is written really badly with the formula postname/filename/blogTitle, ending up with trunkated, too long, title tags, that result in duplicate page title. How can I simply hide these mediapages or sculpting the title tag the way I want? I am using all-in-one-seo WP plugin, which doesn't seem to provide a solution. Thank you all! DoMiSol Rossini SOwZg5C.jpg
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Whitespace INSIDE # tag harmful?
Hi, I understand that 'whitespace' in source code is absolutely fine and is stripped out. For example the following code is fine: Red Apples some text However, how is whitespace interpreted INSIDE html tags such as H1's? My Dev team have instructions to add H1's to a page, however they have done so like this: Red Apples (37 characters long) rather than this: Red Apples (10 characters long) Do you think this extra space will be harmful? The browser renders it fine, however if you use something like the mozbar plugin is shows the H1 length as 37 characters. I know the 10 character H1 is 100% relevant to the search term "Red Apples", however is the 37 character H1 only 27% relevant? (10/37) I've made the request to the Dev team to remove this whitespace because I'd rather err on the side of caution, but its been knocked back because the HTML spec specifies consecutive white-space should be interpreted as a single space and all browsers build the DOM by trimming a tags value - and they imagine search bots do the same so don't want to mess with the compiler. Anyone have experience of this? I've never had whitespace in a H1 before so don't know. Happy to leave the whitespace in if it's not going to be an issue. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Fix duplicate content caused by tags
Hi everyone, TGIF. We are getting hundreds of duplicate content errors on our WP site by what appears to be our tags. For each tag and each post we are seeing a duplicate content error. I thought I had this fixed but apparently I do not. We are using the Genesis theme with Yoast's SEO plugin. Does anyone have the solution to what I imagine is this easy fix? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | okuma0 -
What to do with Deleted Posts?
Hi Guys, To give way to the implementation of Google Panda, I have deleted some of my wordpress blog posts with low quality content. Now, I am seeing some errors in my Webmasters Tools. What needs to be done so that these errors will be fixed? Thanks....
Technical SEO | | Trigun0 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0