I know tags are important, I have not done away with them all together. My Google traffic had gone so far through the floor I had nothing to lose so any mistake I have made won't be a big deal, I can always spend time putting some tags back again if necessary.

I can not say that category or tag causes a decrease traffic because it does not happen on my blog. But I can only say the things I do to increase traffic. And the thing that I did was the "old" tips.

1. Write and keep writing. This is to keep the google bot always see something new on my blog.
2. As long as I'm not being lazy or forgot, I always make a list of 10 recent articles on the end of each post (using shortcodes). - visitors more easily view the latest posts.
3. Always make inbound links between relevant posts.
4. Utilizing social media (facebook.com, etc) as much as possible.

Unfortunately, you've remove and / or change the category and tag before we knew whether it was the cause of the search problem.

(Sorry with my English)

I have noticed that the tag, category and archive pages that wordpress generates are not included the wordpress.com sitemap generated for my site. Only posts, user generated pages and pics/media are in the sitemap. So when I have deleted a post then resubmitted the updated sitemap to google webmaster tools the removed posts are removed from the Google index within a few days. But because the tag links pages etc. are found by google when the bot crawls the site and not via the sitemap, now I have removed those tags, google webmaster tools is just throwing up errors. Hopefully eventually google will realize I deleted the tags and categories on purpose and it will drop them from their index.

The blog is http://ijdmtoy.com/BLOG/wordpress/

If that's case I will also try to reduce my tags for all the posts.

If I am right then this seems to affect wordpress.com blogs that have over a certain amount of posts, which is why it only happens after running the blog for a while. The blog then builds up a number of posts, tags, picture titles (and alt tags) and categories that have "similar content", which you would expect when a blog is based on a certain topic or subject. Then Google decides that it doesn't like all this similar content (this is strange to me when it is normal to have a blog targeting one subject), then Googles algo creates the mess described and experienced by you and me.

As I have mentioned above I have tried to make a number of manual changes to my blog which is lengthy and laborious and I don't know if it will work yet. As I also mention above I think this could be easily rectified for us (the users) with a better sitemap that states posts take priority over tag pages, categories, media, archives etc. but here at wordpress.com we are relying on the wordpress.com team to generate our sitemap. at the moment that sitemap is incredibly basic and not nearly comprehensive enough. I am not an expert though and I know a different sitemap structure might affect other things so I don't know but it would be nice if the techies could at least look at it.

Before this issue (I realized this issue on Aug 20th), whenever I post a new article, it will show up on google 1st page in about 30 mins at most.

However right now, the post title will not show up anymore unless I am searching the entire title with quotation marks.

Now it will either show up in the tag exactly like you are having or show the title of my blog homepage and the article title becomes the description.

My traffic has dropped about 50% now.

I am suspecting it was due to a maybe blackhat SEO...but not completely sure

I am no expert and I don't particularly want to be (that's why I use wordpress.com) but it seems that if a tag, category or media title is similar to a blog post or page title, google will choose those over the blog posts or pages. This should rarely be the case and I don't know why they would do that but that's how their automatic engine seems to pick apart wordpress sites since their last update. The only way to address this is through the sitemap to set how google prioritizes similar content. In my opinion blog posts and pages should take priority in most cases over archives, tags, categories, media titles etc.

Because of the basic way sitemaps are generated by wordpress.com we seem to be at a serious disadvantage to those that can create and edit their own sitemaps since the last Google algo update.

I know changing the sitemap setup could have implications and as I have said I am not an expert on this but I think the wordpress.com team should look at this.

1) I removed or renamed all tags and categories that had the same or similar name as a blog post (I commonly tagged blog posts with similar or the same title as the blog post and this is often seen as duplicate titles and possibly content by google).

2) I cleaned up the tags and categories generally and deleted a lot that were over used and unnecessary. My posts are now in 1 (or a few are in 2) category and have maximum 3 tags. These tags are now commonly one or two word tags like "work" "Inspiration" "education" "charity work" rather than some of the longer tags I used to have.

3) I changed the name and the title of any media/pics I used in blog posts that had the same or similar names as the blog posts. This could be quite common to help you identify which posts you used pics or media in but again this can be seen as duplicate titles and content by google so I think they had to be changed. I had to do this in each blog post because unlike the tags and categories which I edited or deleted from the dashboard when I changed the media/pic files it did not change the titles under each post.

This has been quite a laborious process but I am hoping it will work. It will take at least another few weeks for my site to be re-indexed, re-crawled etc. I will post back here with results because I think if I am right then the mistakes I made could be quite common for wordpress.com users and they should be made aware.

I will keep you posted but it would be good if anyone else had any thoughts on this. Anyone?

On your other point I think you will find the link on the header that says MATT'S BLOG is a link to my blog? Are you not seeing that?

This is still a mystery because it is not a problem affecting everyone but is clearly affecting quite a few and it is not at all obvious why.

I wish someone could shed some light on it because google are adamant that it's a site structure issue and as I am using a standard template and doing standard stuff with no add ons, not even a different font! It MUST be an issue within wordpress.com or some strange quirk of how I am using, a widget, tags, categories etc. Either way I would hope someone could point me in the right direction.

Have you confirmed whether or not your posts are showing in the Reader? There are hundreds of people complaining that they are not, and staff are trying to narrow down why; it seems to have something to do with their feeds. I gave up on the Reader long ago, so I am not terribly familiar with it, but if there's a problem with your feed, that WILL have an effect.

This morning I drastically reduced the number of tags I used. I removed 3 or 4 categories to simplify that a bit too.

I also made sure I removed all tags that were the same or very similar as the blog title in case google was picking 1 of the 2 and choosing the tag over the blog post itself. After looking through everything there is a good chance this is the culprit but it might take a while for my changes to reflect in the search results. It would be great to find out from other wordpress.com users if they have had similar problems and whether they found any partial or full solutions.

Before April if I searched for certain phrases my post would be at number 3 and my tag or category link would show up half way down the first page somewhere. Now the post is on page 146 of results but tags are still half way down first page. That is not a bit of extra juice for tags and categories but posts are now a bit further down. That is a an obvious toilet flush on ALL posts, past, present and future but tags are still where they were.

Going to an independentlly hosted blog will DECREASE your search engine status.

I've been here six years and there's no question Google did something to increase the juice of local tag pages and decrease the juice of individual posts, but I see the same effect on my independently-hosted blogs as well.

Hate to keep saying it but I still can't believe more people haven't been making more noise about this, it's been 4 months since the google update that seems to have affected this, there must be many other wordpress.com users that have seen a serious drop off in search traffic. There must be a solution even if it is to go to a hosted wordpress blog. Is WordPress.com keeping this suppressed because they know it is now a serious negative against using wordpress.com vs .org hosted??