Wordpress Tags

I have been using Wordpress for many years, but have only started working with tags recently. And am not sure how I should be going about it. All in One SEO gives one the option to noindex what I assume is considered duplicate content.

What are the basic rules and why?

Pages are straight forward. They are static. No archiving. No duplicate content. How do posts work?

They get filed in date order. Over time they get buried and can't be found by Google? This is why we need Archives? What is Archived content? How does it differ from the original content?

Wordpress allows one to file posts by multiple categories. Creating duplicate content? What about tags? Do you create a duplicate post/page with every tag or do they work like the meta title? Wordpress comes with tags on posts but not pages. Why not pages?

I added a plugin to add tags to pages. Good idea or not? Sorry for all the questions. Am a bit lost.

Damn, those are a lot of questions. I'll answer some of them while I wait for this Ibuprofen to kick in.

urbanramble said:

Pages are straight forward. They are static. No archiving. No duplicate content. How do posts work?

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The differences between pages and posts can be found below.
https://ithemes.com/tutorials/wordpress-posts-vs-pages/

A WordPress post is what makes up the blog aspect of your site.

• These are generally news or informational updates about a certain topic or talking point.
• Posts are listed in reverse chronological order and can be tagged, categorized and even archived on your site.
• WordPress posts are what make up the RSS content of your WordPress blog. So, when someone subscribes to your RSS feed, your posts will be the content that’s delivered to them.
• Think of the posts at the news portion of your site. They’re dynamic and constantly changing the content your end users sees.

WordPress Pages are similar to posts in that they have a title and body text, but they are different because:

• they are generally reserved for static content or information.
• Examples of this would be an About Me or Contact Us page.
• Pages are not listed by date and can’t be categorized or tagged like WordPress posts,
• Pages can have a hierarchy, which means you can nest pages under other pages by making one the “Parent” of the other, thus creating a group of pages.
• Due to their static nature, pages aren’t included in RSS feeds and won’t have date or time publishing

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urbanramble said:

Wordpress allows one to file posts by multiple categories... Wordpress comes with tags on posts but not pages. Why not pages?

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Because pages are organised by subfolders (you can see a parent page option under the page attributes) and posts are organised by categories and tags, although I put my posts in a "blog" subfolder.

urbanramble said:

Creating duplicate content? What about tags? Do you create a duplicate post/page with every tag or do they work like the meta title?

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It's non-malicious duplicate content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_content

Every tag and category creates a new page on your site that shows snippets or the full-text version of the posts they've been applied to, which is why people typically no-index category and tag pages. I honestly didn't see a difference on any of the sites I no-indexed the category and tag pages on as I used to include a unique article at the top of those pages describing the category or tag, but I've spoken to people who claim to have seen a difference in their rankings after no-indexing them. There is some logic behind no-indexing them involving crawl budget as well.

Archive pages are basically pages where lists to your posts are shown. For example, if you have 20 posts a page that lists them ordered by date would be a type of archive page. Another type of archive page is the one that lists all your posts in a special category, or any other relevant parameter.

Categories are hierarchical and are designed to be associated only once in a post. Tags, on the other hand, are non-hierarchical and are meant to be attached more than once in a post.

If you have a post that talks about cars, ideally the only category should be "cars" and the tags would be What describes the post topic, for example, "suv", "hybrids", "7-seats" and so on. Here subcategories come into play as well.

In reality it's more complicated and depends on your site's topics, sections and how you decide to structure it.

Why would one use tags that have been noindexed? The on-site Search?

Until recently I was key word stuffing my title tag and then slowly bleeding the key words down into child pages. But Google coughed and spluttered over more than one of them. So I have cleaned most of them up and immediately started key word stuffing again, using tags. It is not working terribly well and I suspect I am being told that too much of anything is a bad practice.

User experience. Easy to find related content on site.

Taqgs should be noindexed.

urbanramble said:

Why would one use tags that have been noindexed? The on-site Search?

Until recently I was key word stuffing my title tag and then slowly bleeding the key words down into child pages. But Google coughed and spluttered over more than one of them. So I have cleaned most of them up and immediately started key word stuffing again, using tags. It is not working terribly well and I suspect I am being told that too much of anything is a bad practice.

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Well you should definitely tag the Wordpress posts. In fact, Google used to place a lot of authority on the Wordpress tagged articles, in which it appears that the tagged articles also related to relevant content. So in a way, you will need to tag related keywords to the article, and not simply putting unrelated keywords, as that may simply make things not so good in a way.

Google is picking up the tagged pages. But is taking a lot of time to index and cache the original page url. Have noindexed the tags archive to see if it makes a difference. But it is difficult to when Google has cleaned out it's cache.