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Too many tags? Search problems

  1. mattkinsella
    Member

    This issue is less about the number of categories and tags and more about the similarity between the blog post titles and the tags and/or categories used. Hence why I think redsoulnights has a similar problem even though they claim not to use too many tags (I can't verify this because there is no link to their site).

    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.

  2. thegiddygoat
    Member

    @mattkinsella you wouldn't find redsoulnights (Nathan) anyway. He was an author on my blog and that blog has now been deleted. It was my blog he was refering to. We dropped the amount of tags and only used two categories but we then had absolutely zero hits from Google search. I really believe the tags ARE important for Google and without them you become invisible. I think you may have made a mistake in changing things the way you did, but time will tell.

  3. duto
    Member

    I think the problem is not on tags and categories. I use 3-9 tags on each post and there are many posts that I put in 2-3 categories. Based on my blog stats, the traffic continues to rise. In one day there are about 7000-10000 unique visitors (according to histats.com) with pageviews in the range of 50000-70000 / day.

    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)

  4. mattkinsella
    Member

    I know I stated in the original part of this thread that I was wondering about the amount of tags but I have since explained that I think it is more about the similarity between tags and post titles. e.g. having a post title of "My Latest book reviews" and then using tags for that post "latest book reviews" and "book reviews" This seems to result in google detecting similar content and then picking the tag pages to show in search results instead of the blog post. I did this a lot even for obscure and specific post titles, I often replicated that post title in a tag.

    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.

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