Tags & SEO

Hello all,

Long time lurker here. I have a question regarding tags and other white-hat SEO items.

When I first started my blog almost a decade ago, I had no clue what I was doing. So I put a bunch of tags on things because I didn't understand them. There are over 5,000 tags on the website right now and I am not sure if fixing them is worth it. I have checked the traffic going to the tags, and most of them are not generating any traffic. It also makes my blog look like a mess with random tags on all sorts of posts. I guess this makes the internal linking structure of my website a complete cluster and a poor experience for the user. Some of the tags are ranking higher than the actual post they represent.

How important are tags for a website?
Will editing them hurt SEO?

There are thousands of posts on my blog catered to a very specific niche.

I was thinking of getting an SEO consult, but the amount of money it would take to hire an SEO consult is outrageous due to how large my site is. I got rid of Yoast and started using Framework and that already seemed to fix a lot of the issues I have been having (overall AHREFS audit went up 50 points).

Any recommendations would be awesome. I do not mind putting in the work so long as I know I will see results.

Thanks!

Hayworth said:

How important are tags for a website?

Click to expand...

they're not important (from a SEO perspective anyway). They help with making navigation easier for big websites that are poorly structured, and that's about it!

Hayworth said:

Will editing them hurt SEO?

Click to expand...

if your tags rank higher than your actual content pages there's something wrong with your site. Tags should never rank anywhere, much less rank higher than actual pages. And the fact that you're seeing them outranking your content pages is weird to me. You've probably checked your site's rankings using the "site:" operator, and for this operator tags do show up in google's index, but that's hardly an official ranking. If you want to check your actual rankings log out of your google account (youtube, gmail, whatever it is that you're logged into), connect to american IP using a VPN (because I assume you want to rank in google USA, otherwise connect to an IP from a country that you wish to rank in), and then check your rankings. Otherwise google will show you personalized rankings

Hayworth said:

I got rid of Yoast and started using Framework and that already seemed to fix a lot of the issues I have been having

Click to expand...

smart move

Hayworth said:

I do not mind putting in the work so long as I know I will see results.

Click to expand...

great attitude, but... what results are you trying to see exactly? I assume better rankings (or maybe any rankings at all), but this is a general goal that can only be reached by taking specific steps. And to give you the steps we would need to know more about your website (which is not recommended to make public here, so don't do it!) and what exactly is wrong with it.

Yes, tags aren't doing much for SEO.

Personally, I just use categories and internal links to structure my website.

The fact that some of your tags are ranking higher than your posts, is probably reason enough for not using them.

Hayworth said:

Hello all,

Long time lurker here. I have a question regarding tags and other white-hat SEO items.

When I first started my blog almost a decade ago, I had no clue what I was doing. So I put a bunch of tags on things because I didn't understand them. There are over 5,000 tags on the website right now and I am not sure if fixing them is worth it. I have checked the traffic going to the tags, and most of them are not generating any traffic. It also makes my blog look like a mess with random tags on all sorts of posts. I guess this makes the internal linking structure of my website a complete cluster and a poor experience for the user. Some of the tags are ranking higher than the actual post they represent.

How important are tags for a website?
Will editing them hurt SEO?

There are thousands of posts on my blog catered to a very specific niche.

I was thinking of getting an SEO consult, but the amount of money it would take to hire an SEO consult is outrageous due to how large my site is. I got rid of Yoast and started using Framework and that already seemed to fix a lot of the issues I have been having (overall AHREFS audit went up 50 points).

Any recommendations would be awesome. I do not mind putting in the work so long as I know I will see results.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Tags can be helpful on the site, especially for users as they can help them navigate through the site much quicker and find the desired information, but you shouldn't definitely overload the site and the content with them, as you did before, as then they don't have any sense of value. Now, I would say that you have to edit them, as if you don't do it, you'll risk your ranking as tags currently are pretty much a mess. Try to divide them into some categories, sections, separate them by topics or something like that. Make a brief plan before you start executing it and it will help you make the right decision.

Thanks for the help everyone.