Are post tags on blogs still useful?
-
Hello
I have a number of sites on Wordpress which all still use the post tag feature. Is this something that I should really be avoiding due to duplicate content issues in the url's of the site, or is it still something that can help SEO wise?
I only ask as I did a crawl diagnostics report on SEOmoz and it found that 48 of my title elements were too short due to these tags in the URL's.
If you do all suggest I keep using them, should they be 3 odd words which are keywords?
Thanks in advance.
-
One quick aside: categories in WordPress are easier to SEO then tags. Wordpress collects category descriptions. Plugins like All In One SEO Pack can use this info to write a meta description for you. Wordpress doens't collect descriptions for tags so plugins can' use this info to write out a meta description for your tag pages.
-
Search engines can't really tell the difference between types of pages.
Do you want your tag pages to rank in search results? If so you could add a description. The All In One SEO plugin I mentioned could help with this. However, as I alluded to before, it's tough to get lots of tag pages to rank well in google. I wouldn't worry too much about adding meta descriptions for them.
-
Hi Daniel,
Regarding blocking the tag directory in the robots.txt file, I did some searching about on SEOmoz and I found this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions where she says that
The best way to use a robots.txt file is to not use it at all. Well... almost. Use it to indicate that robots have full access to all files on your website and to direct robots to your sitemap.xml file. That’s it.
Would you agree with this or do you still think that blocking the tags would help? What you are saying makes sense to me but I just wanted to double check with you before I did it!
Many thanks
-
Thanks for your help guys. One more question.....on the crawl diagnostics report mentioned above, there are 48 meta descriptions missing which are all on tag url's. Is this a probem or can a search engine distinquish between a tag and a real post?
-
I run a wedding blog. A few of our categories rank highly in google. None of our tags do. Of course to Google tags and categories are essentially the same thing.
There are some simple WordPress plugins that allow you to noindex or nofollow your tags if you decide you're worried about duplicate content or want to do some page rank scuplting. I recommend the All In One SEO Pack.
-
Tags never were useful for SEO and are not now. They are strictly a usability feature. If you use categories then tags are certainly obsolete. If you use the all in one seo pack you can noindex your tag pages I believe, so I would do this to avoid duplicate issues. Also block the /tag/ directory in your robots.txt file.
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
-
Blogging , do I create a huge blog which links to all my sites
Blogging , do I create a huge blog which links to all my sites or do i create a blog on each site, or do i guest blog to each site from other peoples blogs 😞 which is best ?
Content Development | | SocialAssist1 -
Which blog is best
We use Bigcommerce, at the moment we use wordpress for our blogs, bigcommerce has its own blog. Is it better to use the Bigcommerce blog or Wordpress.
Content Development | | CostumeD0 -
Starting a brand new blog today - Is it still Wordpress?
Hi I started a blog in 2006 on Blogspot, then everyone moved onto Tumblr and Wordpress, but in August (just) 2013, what should I be starting my brand new blog on? I dont want to have to migrate in a matter on months.
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
How to promote press releases and guest posts
Hi, i would like to know what is the best way to promote press releases and guest posts. We do a lot of guest articles where we write for other sites and we also do a lot of free press releases, but i would like the hard work to pay off and would like to know what are the best methods to promote these press releases and guests posts. what I would like to do is to have our brand name come up a lot in the search engines. any other methods to do this would also be a great help
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Blogs, blogspot, tumblr etc
We currently have our own wordpress blog on our site using wordpress, is it worth while having others such as blogspot, tumblr etc for seo purposes? Or would I be wasting my time and efforts?
Content Development | | Shuffled0 -
What is your take on using Google images for blogs
In your opinion, do you think it is okay to use Google images for your blog posts as long as it credits or includes a link to the site in which you located it? We tried looking at stock art for some license-free photos and had no luck in coming up with good pictures. What rules or guidelines do you follow when looking for pictures for your customers blog (or your own)? A lot of our posts have to do with "what to do in this city" or "Where to go in this city". Do you think it's okay to use Google images for these types of posts?
Content Development | | qlkasdjfw0 -
I use a CDN
Hi there my sitemap is @ www.mobbly.com/sitemap.xml and images are stored on cdn.mobbly.com I have verified cdn.mobbly.com but as there is no sitemap apart from mobbly.com/sitemap.xml google has 3000 images in sitemap but only 289 indexed - was all when all were on the same domain any advice would be good
Content Development | | jimmy1640 -
Looking for advice on blog implementation...
I am getting ready to implement a blog for my company. We have our website controlled through a commercial Content Management System that has a blog feature, but it is cumbersome to use and doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a Wordpress blog for example. I know for SEO purposes that we would be better to use the CMS blog and make it a subfolder (www.mysite.com/blog) instead of using a subdomain (blog.mysite.com). However, we would like to use the hosted WordPress blog and find a way to retain the same SEO value for our www.mysite.com site that it would provide being a subfolder on the site. Any suggestions? Installing Word Press CMS on our current web servers is not an option. We would have to use Wordpress hosting services for the blog.
Content Development | | KHCreative0