Should I use categories or tags to organize my content?

Categories can be a great way to organize content on a website- but it can also create a big mess. Here’s what you should look out for…

Automated Transcript:

I like to use categories. My rule for categories is and it’s just personal. Preference is an SEO thing. Is every post should be in one category only. Wow, that’s just my preference. Yeah, this isn’t me do both. We do categories and we do tags and we actually expanded our categories to be a little bit more topic-specific most of our posts. So we are two main categories. The like the primary is always either professional resource or Current resource. Okay? And after that, we categorize it further but it always falls into one of those two. So you’re saying, like, that’s useful, but the stupid tags that I have to sit and like, do like parents autism. Well, type it. If that doesn’t make a difference, I’m just going to stop doing that because I’m only doing it because in problems is what it could be doing. So so think about his ways of organizing your content if you use like I prefer to use categories to say. Every post I ever publishes in one category, parent resource to child resource, it’s either one of the other can’t be both right? In my hypothetical universe. May be another category be like company is okay. Well it’s probably not a parent resource, if it’s company news. Or whatever. So that we have three categories. Now, I might use tags if I need to divide up that into further dimensions and maybe Dimensions across those. So it’s like lets you. Do you have a couple locations now? So maybe at a tag per location. So this is news. For this location or this is for parents in this same location and so a tag kind of organizes things differently. So what it does is it makes it really easy for a user to say I’m interested in only things for parents. And you click on the parent category and there’s a list of only things from parents. If you are only interested in child resources, you can click on that. But tags allow you to have a secondary Dimension, but with which, you can organize your site that is what tags do. So most cases people don’t need tags. The way it can cause problems, is it can create a real duplicate content problem within your own site. So, let’s say you had a tag for New Jersey in a tag for NJ, which is the postal code for New Jersey. The MJ in the New Jersey tag pages. When you click to only view posts by that, might have the exact same listing of Articles, and therefore, would have the exact same content and therefore, Google has to decide do I want to use the NJ or the New Jersey one? We know what, Google decide we want to tell Google what to do. So that’s why we wouldn’t want to do that. So First thing is, maybe we stop using tags until we need to know to use them, right? So the yay. Look at you’ve got a whole bunch of free time now. Hopefully, you haven’t been spending that much time on tags, but oh no, it’s like an annoying part of posting the blog sitting and being like, Oh God, what are the tags I should use and now I find. I really don’t need to do that at all. I mean picked like it’s good news. But it’s also like 30 seconds of annoyance because I can also had been relieved of 30 seconds of annoying. You’re welcome. But that, the WordPress internal search feature is actually pretty good and it doesn’t need those tags to to display searches. For instance, I’m curious ants, you can do a search for we just did a search for a nofollow and I haven’t don’t use tags at all, but it found several instances of the word nofollow in the content of the curia cents website. Potentially problematic enough that I should go into past post and remove tags. So what do you do? When you remove a page from the website redirect, you redirect it. So every page you remove, you’ll need to have a 301 redirect to send that URL to us from removing the tag because that page will no longer exist. Okay, so here’s what I would do to assess the impact, okay, log into your Google search console. Go to Let’s see if I can pull, I don’t want to share my screen. Go into Google search console and see if I can find this. I’ll make sure I get it right and go to your coverage report on the left hand side. There’s a treasure Trove of information in here. This is where Google might have truck, my tell you, they’re having trouble with parts of your website. There’s a lot of information. What you want to select? Do you want me to share my screen if you don’t mind sharing your data? Yeah, you should be able to share your screen now. All right, coverage report, okay. Scroll to the top of this coverage report. There we go. So we’re not at this point for this conversation. Interested in your one error. Congratulations, you got one error. Okay, moving on hit tap touch the excluded. Yeah. Okay. These are pages that they have Google has decided. It’s not going to include in the search index. Hmm. So this is basically Google saying we are not going to serve these two people. Yeah, I know, I think we, a few months ago, went through this. And because I remember, we established somewhat shockingly that we really don’t have any pages that need to be indexed, that It right which is great. See how it says something, moving around. All right, I’m sorry. Duplicate 1 2 3 4 5 6 down duplicate submitted URL, not selected as canonical, scroll down a little bit more. Duplicate without user selected canonical. Remember I said, one of the problems is with tags that are a little overzealous as we create duplicate content. Mmm. So you have a duplicate without user selected cannot, and I have an article on Curious, Dance all about every literally, every one of these error messages to give you a little bit more detail. But the short version is, you know, we’ve talked about canonical tags, where there’s a way to tell Google. Hey, this is the version of the page. You should be looking at. We know, there might be other versions of this page, but look at this one. So the duplicate without user selected canonical means hey we have to leave determined, there are several copies of the page and we don’t know which one you want us to serve. You have zero of those. So okay great. If that’s great, you have 33 that are duplicates. Mitad URL not selected as canonical. So click on that. and you scroll down and we can see which Pages Google thinks are duplicates and so they’ve you’ve submitted pages to them. Probably through your XML sitemap and Google said, you know what, even though you’ve told us this page is here, we are not going to serve it. These are all workshops. So honestly, this isn’t bad because you can’t even access these Pages unless purchase the workshop. Great. Then there’s no big deal and you can actually click on them. You can inspect them all that. Yeah. Because lessons and quizzes. They’re all part of workshops. Right? Great. So if it’s doing what you want to do no problem right? No party. No foul. Yeah you can click on the word coverage at the top of this page. Yeah that one and go back to excluded. And scroll it conveniently listed by an order crawled. Currently not indexed might be some of the look at, you know, it I don’t see anything here, that’s telling me you have a problem that’s being caused by this, I I would just stop wasting your time doing that. Unless you feel, there is a secondary means to organize your content to make it useful. For your people. Yeah. Yeah this kind of goes to a point where when we when we set up a Blog it’s probably a good idea to think strategically about how we’re going to organize what we’re going to write about in our blog and how we’re going to organize the content. I so I just my personal preference is Rule, everything goes in one category, 1 category, only and also as a rule again, not a requirement. My personal rule is that only create another category when I know at least two or three articles will be described by that category because I don’t want a category with one article in it. Right. Right. I use that rule with tags to, but most people don’t need to use tags because it’s just a way of organizing, its think about as a way of making it easy for people. So print people, Stood in one parenting. Resource of might be interested in a bunch of other parenting resources. Yeah. And it is prior. We only had a couple categories and what we did was kind of an overhaul of that since we have more content now to cut because there are some things that kind of cross the Divide between parent and professional. So this allows that and so maybe that was the point where we could have stopped with the tags, is really Expanded our categories because that seems to be the better like organizational unit as far as that goes but even still we only have 2 Min like landing pages like we have the parent resource blog, landing page and the professional resource blog landing page and like everything else would be search related because we don’t so let’s say we have like a dozen different categories. We don’t have a dozen different like clickable pages to land on On. Does that make sense? So I hope that’s right. Yeah, / good. Yeah you know it’s I feel like this is one of these things that I don’t know who started telling people tagging helps your SEO. Oh smack them like it really is such bad advice like it’s such a waste of time and I keep hearing people say this I’m like where’s your buddy getting this from like where a lot of people? Well, I hope that saves some trouble at least every little bit counts.