Stop using tags to avoid duplicate content.
Why stop using tags especially if you are not going to use them often. If you tag your blog posts with tags that you do not use often then they could be hurting your blogs rankings. A simple reason why is because each tag you create needs a separate description like categories. If you do not create a description for the tag you can end up with duplicate content issues with ranking in search console.
It’s too easy to create a tag and never use it again.
How many times have you clicked on a tag and found only the post you have read is the only content?. Look at this post for example instead of just creating a tag called tags I just use the wordpress category. So if anyone clicks wordpress they will see more than one blog post. Sometimes we just want to write about a topic and will easily just create a tag about it for the sake of tagging the post. If you have the habit of doing this and write about random topics then stop using tags.
If you don’t want to stop using tags then remove the tags from your sitemap
Depending on your SEO plugin that you are using in your wordpress blog. You can choose not to index tag pages this will avoid the duplicate content issues so make sure you don’t include a tag sitemap. This way your post title will show in search results pages and not your tag pages. Tag pages tend to have a high bounce rate in search results when they do rank this will hurt your overall rankings. As the tag is ranking but the content is not and when people cant find exactly what they are looking for they will exit quickly.
Sometimes tags and categories can outrank the blog post.
I have often searched for my blog site:https:// and found tags out ranking the blog post. When I clicked trough I could not find the post I was looking for as it was on /p2 that is me searching for something on my blog I know is there do you think a stranger is going to use the search again button?. The same applies to your blog
You don’t have to stop using tags but tag clouds suck
Face it tag clouds are ugly are rarely used they can also create the issue of too many urls linking from a single page. So if you are using tags then try not to use tag clouds like most visitors. They are also confusing to search engines you are not still in 2008 when every blog had a tag cloud in the sidebar.
Use internal links in your posts instead of tags
Tags are just a bad internal site structuring method to use. It’s better to link to your related posts in your blog post content and build natural internal links. Tags look generated and not natural like in article links.
I am not the only one saying to stop using tags
Other bloggers like myself are saying things like tags are too confusing to visitors and search engines alike because of thin content issues.
If you do not want to stop using tags then follow the advice in this blog post from yoast to configure your tags for readers and search engines. If you are using yoast seo plugin it also applies to most sitemap enabled seo plugins for wordpress like rankmath.
2 responses to “Why I decided to stop using tags on my blog”
Hi Chris, I have started to learn this as well recently. I took some training on wealthy affiliate that said about this. There is a guy on here who posts a new training video every week. Most people on the site trust him and he said about tags creating unnecessary pages etc. Now with new posts, I might use 1 or 2 but yeah I think you are right. Like if I review a branded product I will use a tag and maybe the owners name. I think you need to be very careful about using them. Thanks for sharing;
regards;
Alex
Thanks how to add tags to wordpress blog don’t if you can is probably the best answer. Unless you know how to use tags in wordpress the best way to avoid thin content pages and poor search display pages.