Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
-
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
-
Hey Dan
Ha! Yes a lot changes but this is one thing that has stayed consistent - it's still totally fine to delete old tags. They will result in a 404, but those 404s are generally harmless!
-
8 years later, I learned something. Solid. Very solid. Thank you for sharing the knowledge, Dan!
8 years however is an eternity in the world of SEO. Are there any updates on your stance re. this problem in particular?
Following your guide and generating reports to put them in the "Nay"-bag, I want to delete them. I'm going to remove them from index first by nofollowing the tags taxonomy, and removing from XML sitemap.
So, the big "What if" ... What if I simply delete all of them after doing so?
-
Maybe 35 of them?
You can just leave those 35 indexed then.
I would just really like to get rid of most of them. It's so cluttered! Tags make up for nearly 60% of my site. That's no good.
Bear in mind you can delete from being visible in site navigation (remove tag clouds, tags from footers, tags at bottoms of posts) but the tag archives will still actually exist. So you can remove the links on-site without actually deleting the pages.
Like you siad in your posts, tag archives can be thin and Google is not down with that. I want to merge the tags with that Yoast Term Optmizer tool but it isn't available anymore I'm worried about doing redirects because that is a lot of redirects!
If you remove tags from on-page links and noindex the ones that aren't bringing traffic that should solve things. 35 redirects for the rest that are bringing traffic is not too many
I also have a question on categories. I currently have three categories each with 12 subcategories. The subcategories are city names. (I work for a bar that has 12 locations). Is that bad form? Would you set it up differently? And if I have a category named nightlife and a subcategory under it named Baltimore, should i check them both for a Baltimore nightlife post or just the Baltimore part?
I would think about how often you'll post in each category. What you don't want is a category with only a post or two sitting in it for months or years. If you think, after a year, each category and sub category will have say 7-10+ posts in it, than it should be fine. It's all about having each category archive be full of content and unique!
-
Maybe 35 of them? I would just really like to get rid of most of them. It's so cluttered! Tags make up for nearly 60% of my site. That's no good. Like you siad in your posts, tag archives can be thin and Google is not down with that. I want to merge the tags with that Yoast Term Optmizer tool but it isn't available anymore I'm worried about doing redirects because that is a lot of redirects!
I also have a question on categories. I currently have three categories each with 12 subcategories. The subcategories are city names. (I work for a bar that has 12 locations). Is that bad form? Would you set it up differently? And if I have a category named nightlife and a subcategory under it named Baltimore, should i check them both for a Baltimore nightlife post or just the Baltimore part?
-
Hey There
The post suggests keeping specific tags that are receiving traffic indexed. You can do this on a tag by tag basis with Yoast. The post also does not recommend deleting tags, just noindexing them.
I would suggest keeping tags that are bringing the most traffic indexed, while just noindexing the rest. Do not delete them. Out of your 1,000+ tags - how many are responsible for the 700+ visits?
There's also the option to 301 redirect tags to the most relevant post or category. But again, I would only do this with tags that aren't bringing substantial traffic.
-Dan
-
Dan,
I read your post and did all the spreadsheet stuff and I am still hesitant to noindex my tags. My blog has 321 posts with 1,240 tags. I understand that this is way too many and that I need to cut down. However, I am worried about losing the traffic I am getting from these tags, especially if I noindex them as you suggest.
About 3% of my monthly non-paid search traffic is coming from these tags. The bounce rate is 55%, which is only slightly greater than the site average. So on average monthly, about 715 people come in from the tags without bouncing, which is a little over 2% of my total non-bounce traffic. While it is only 2%, it is still a good amount of people. I don't want to lose this traffic. If I delete these tags and noindex the remainders, how can I expect to recover for this traffic?
-
Fortunately I predicted this question a year and nineteen days ago: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/
No seriously, you just want to run that analysis to make sure you're not killing a random tag or two with some traffic or links. In which case you can selectively delete and/or noindex.
-Dan
-
Wissam
Thanks for the most excellent link to the John Mueller post. I learned something new today thanks to you.
Best,
Robert
-
I wont worry about them, its totally fine to have 404 errors ... make sure you dont have any quality links pointing to these pages ( i dnt think there will be ) . but other than that dont worry about it
On another note, please check this G+ Post from John Mueller (Googler)
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm
hope it helps
cheers
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
-
Sitemap error in Webmaster tools - 409 error (conflict)
Hey guys, I'm getting this weird error when I submit my sitemap to Google. It says I'm getting a 409 error in my post-sitemap.xml file (https://cleargear.com/post-sitemap.xml). But when I check it, it looks totally fine. I am using YoastSEO to generate the sitemap.xml file. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a big deal? If so, Does anyone know how to fix? Thanks EwTswL4
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian0 -
GWT giving me 404 errors based on old and deleted site map
I'm getting a bunch of 404 crawl errors in my Google Webmaster Tools because we just moved our site to a new platform with new URL structure. We 301 redirected all the relevant pages. We submitted a new site map and then deleted all the site maps to the old website url structure. However, google keeps crawling the OLD urls and reporting back the 404 errors. It says that the website is linking to these 404 pages via an old outdated sitemap (which if you goto shows a 404 as well, so it's not as if Google is reading these old site maps now). Instead it's as if Google has cached the old sitemap but continues to use it to crawl these non-existent pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
WordPress Slideshow Gallery Not Showing Alt Tags or any relavent info ?
Hi guys i have started adding my seo tags to my image keywords ie alt tags captions etc.... but when i go to inspect the slideshow that image then appears in there none of the alt tags etc in them? Does anyone know how to add then?
Technical SEO | | hemeravisuals0 -
Title Tags in 2013
For blog posts do you think it is better to use something like "Atlanta Plumbing Company" or "Choosing an Atlanta Plumbing Company" (article title). I have been using the article titles but I think it might be hindering rankings a bit. I use to use the keyword but it seems a bit spammy now. I want to create titles for the readers but rank well too. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
Authorship and Publisher on WordPress
I successfully enabled rel=publisher on our WordPress blog, and as a test I also enabled rel=authorship for a set of blog posts. (Tested both in Google's Rich Snippets Tester.) However, on the individual blog posts the publisher credit disappears. Is there a way to enable both to appear on blog posts?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
404 errors on non-existent URLs
Hey guys and gals, First Moz Q&A for me and really looking forward to being part of the community. I hope as my first question this isn't a stupid one but I was just struggling to find any resource that dealt with the issue and am just looking for some general advice. Basically a client has raised a problem with 404 error pages - or the lack thereof- on non-existent URLs on their site; let's say for example: 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas' Obviously content never existed on this page so its not like you're saying 'hey, sorry this isn't here anymore'; its more like- 'there was never anything here in the first place'. Currently in this fictitious example typing in 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels/asdfas**'** returns the same content as the 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towels' page which I appreciate isn't ideal. What I was wondering is how far do you take this issue- I've seen examples here on the seomoz site where you can edit the URI in a similar manner and it returns the same content as the parent page but with the alternate address. Should 404's be added across all folders on a site in a similar way? How often would this scenario be and issue particularly for internal pages two or three clicks down? I suppose unless someone linked to a page with a misspelled URL... Also would it be worth placing 301 redirects on a small number of common mis-spellings or typos e.g. 'greatbeachtowels.com/beach-towles' to the correct URLs as opposed to just 404s? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AJ2340 -
Why do I get duplicate content errors just for tags I place on blog entries?
I the SEO MOZ crawl diagnostics for my site, www.heartspm.com, I am getting over 100 duplicate content errors on links built from tags on blog entries. I do have the original base blog entry in my site map not referencing the tags. Similarly, I am getting almost 200 duplicate meta description errors in Google Webmaster Tools associated with links automatically generated from tags on my blog. I have more understanding that I could get these errors from my forum, since the forum entries are not in the sitemap, but the blog entries are there in the site map. I thought the tags were only there to help people search by category. I don't understand why every tag becomes its' own link. I can see how this falsely creates the impression of a lot of duplicate data. As seen in GWT: Pages with duplicate meta descriptions Pages [Customer concerns about the use of home water by pest control companies.](javascript:dropInfo('zip_0div', 'none', document.getElementById('zip_0zipimg'), 'none', null);)/category/job-site-requirements/tag/cost-of-water/tag/irrigation-usage/tag/save-water/tag/standard-industry-practice/tag/water-use 6 [Pest control operator draws analogy between Children's Day and the state of the pest control industr](javascript:dropInfo('zip_1div', 'none', document.getElementById('zip_1zipimg'), 'none', null);)/tag/children-in-modern-world/tag/children/tag/childrens-day/tag/conservation-medicine/tag/ecowise-certified/tag/estonia/tag/extermination-service/tag/exterminator/tag/green-thumb/tag/hearts-pest-management/tag/higher-certification/tag/higher-education/tag/tartu/tag/united-states
Technical SEO | | GerryWeitz0 -
What is with WordPress Dupe issues?
Hi, Just wondering if anyone can explain for me why it seems every tag that is entered in WP blog posts on a site creates a duplicate page (identified by ROGER and friends in SEOmoz crawl)? Obviously if you can offer a solution (apart from the extremely obvious "don't use tags") I would be immensely grateful. Thanks so much,
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0