It’s no secret that tags are in vogue these days. We use hashtags to help people locate our posts on Instagram. On the other hand, if you use tags in this manner on your WordPress site, it will have a negative impact on your SEO. Even if you believe you don’t use them much, you should still read this article. As part of this post, I’ll discuss how tags operate and why overusing them might have a negative impact on your search results. After that, I’ll explain how to make use of them (because they’re not inherently terrible). In the end, I’ll offer you some advice on how to tidy up your site if you’ve used too many of them.
How to utilize tags on a website?
Consider your tags as a wardrobe and your articles as apparel. Sure, you know you can hang your clothing up. That’s a plus. It’ll tidy your room. It is illogical to have more closets than clothes in your room. You’ll wind up with big empty closets. Closets should never be empty. So, if you have 90 posts, keep the tags to 30. Keep your tag-to-post ratio below 1:3.
I see why you want to utilize Instagram hashtags differently. They’re accustomed to searching Instagram postings. They’re utilized to search your Instagram posts as well as the postings of the billions of other Instagram users. Because you’re joining a group of other postings regarding a certain topic, adding extra tags makes sense. However, tags on your website are only utilized inside it. Using such like you do on Instagram is illogical. In fact, using such tags makes your content tougher to discover on Google.
WordPress tags
Use tags to organize your articles. To help you identify a certain article from your many articles. Similar to WordPress categories. WordPress will build a new page for each tag you add. Everything with the same tag goes there.
So every tag you add to WordPress creates a new page. And the content is frequently thin. It only links to the articles you tagged. We at Yoast routinely see sites with thousands of tag pages but few blog entries.
How many of them to use?
Each tag you add eventually results in an additional page for Google to crawl. This will make indexing your website more challenging. And, to make things worse, each tag links to a page with little information. A page that Google despises. If you have more tags than posts, you will have a greater number of ‘poor and thin content pages’ than high-quality material. And Google despises sparse material. Sites having a high percentage of sparse material do not rank highly. As a result, if you use an excessive number of tags, your rankings will suffer.
How to deal with too many tags?
If your website has a large number of tags, you’ll need to delete these pages. The best course of action is to eliminate these tag sites and redirect them to something more valuable. If a tag contains just one blog post, you may simply redirect it to that blog article. This significantly decreases the amount of tag pages. If you have a large site with several tags, this will be a significant amount of labor. However, you really do need to clean things up in order to maintain your position (or start ranking). These tag pages should be deleted and redirected.
Some individuals use tags to ensure that their postings are found by visitors who utilize the internal search function of their website. That makes some sense, given the fact that the WordPress internal search engine is not very effective. However, solving that issue via the use of tags is not the solution. Make certain that you have a functional internal site search in place.
