Can I safely delete unused tags??
-
Can I safely delete unused tags, ones with 0 posts connected to them?
Thanks,
- Mike
-
Hi Mike,
I wouldnt worry too much about this.
Having old pages or removed pages returning 404s is completely fine by Google. Eventually, they will drop those pages from the index.
If you are worried about those pages and/or they are being shown in SERPs and want to remove those urls faster you can use the URL removal tool from Search Console. Sadly, you have to manually submit each url and you cannot do it in bulk.Hope ir help,
Best luck.
Gaston -
Thanks for the reply! But now it seems that pages for those tags still exist, just with no content in them.
Update: Now the empty page is simply showing as a 404 "Uh-Oh...Page not found!"
Hrmm. Where do I go from here? Create 410's? I didn't know any more steps needed to be taken when deleting tag pages with 0 content connected to those tags.
- Mike
-
Hi Mike,
As long as you are referring to Wordpress, yes it's safe to remove tags that have no content nor are being used.
Best of luck.
Gaston
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
-
Can I safely block my product listing from search? Does it even make sense?
Hi, I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages. Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories. My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views: 8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages). Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)? Thanks,
G0 -
Can I set a canonical tag to an anchor link?
I have a client who is moving to a one page website design. So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page. There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section. I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Canonical Tags - Do they only apply to internal duplicate content?
Hi Moz, I've had a complaint from a company who we use a feed from to populate a restaurants product list.They are upset that on our products pages we have canonical tags linking back to ourselves. These are in place as we have international versions of the site. They believe because they are the original source of content we need to canonical back to them. Can I please confirm that canonical tags are purely an internal duplicate content strategy. Canonical isn't telling google that from all the content on the web that this is the original source. It's just saying that from the content on our domains, this is the original one that should be ranked. Is that correct? Furthermore, if we implemented a canonical tag linking to Best Restaurants it would de-index all of our restaurants listings and pages and pass the authority of these pages to their site. Is this correct? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | benj20341 -
Can we use images from the internet of celebrities?
Hi, Can we use images from the internet of celebrities? We have a Indian celebrity website. Can we use images from other websites? Would that be legal? as 100's of sites use them? Should i have them no index ? or no follow pages? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jomin740 -
Can hreflang replace canonicalisation ?
Hi Im working with a site that has ALOT of duplicate content and have recommended developer fix via correct use of Canonicalisation i.e the canonical tag. However a US version (of this UK site) is about to be developed on a subfolder (domain.com/uk/ & domain.com/US/ etc so also looking into adopting the hreflang attribute on these. Upon reading up about the hreflang attribute i see that it performs a degree of canonicalisation too. Does that mean that developing the international versions with hreflang means there's no need to apply canonicalistion tags to deal with the dupe content, since will deal with the original dupe content problems as well as the new country related dupe content, via the hreflang ? I also understand that hreflang and canonicalisation can conflict/clash on different language versions of international subfolders etc as per: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk In this instance we are only looking at US/UK versions but very likely will want to expand into non english countries too in the future like France for example. So given both the above points if you are using hreflang is it advisable (or even best) to totally avoid the canonical tag ? I would be surprised if the answers yes, since whilst makes logical sense given the above (if the above statements are correct), that seems strange given how important and standard best practice canonical usage seems to be these days. What best ? Use the Hreflang alone, or the Canonical tag alone or both ? What does everyone else do in similar situation ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Can a Novice Fix Parallelize Issues?
I was working yesterday on making my WP site quicker (sellingwarnerrobins.com) and after updating the htaccess file to solve some "Leverage Browser Caching" issues I re-ran a scan on Pingdom Tools and am now getting a zero for "Parallelize downloads across hostnames" with a list of 34 items to fix. I did some web searches and when the articles started talking about cnames, subdomains, and hostname distribution it went beyond my capabilities. Are these Parallelize "issues" something a novice like myself can easily fix? If so, how?
Technical SEO | | Anita_Clark0 -
Can I turn off Google site links?
I thought at one time I had turned off the option to have Google sitelinks. I did this so that each of our pages that had a strong presence would occupy a unique slot on the first and second page of Google. This was important to us as we were battling some reputation management issues and trying to push out negative listings from the front page. Recently I noticed sitelinks were back up and when going into Google Webmaster Tools, I could figure out how to opt out of them. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BRConsulting0 -
Can local SEO harm national rankings?
Today I met with a firm called Localeze that provides local directory submissions. I understand the importance of this service if your site is competing locally, however I'm not sure the effects of local SEO for a national brand. Our firm gets most of our traffic from across the country, not just one location, and our business is scattered (which is a good thing). We rank for service related keywords that are not tied to a location. We do not show up for local results so our business in our immediate location is weak. We would like to increase our local presence in search engines but I want to make sure that this will not take away from our national presence. Will optimizing a site for local search negatively affect general rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KevinBloom1