Joost de Valk, creator of the Yoast SEO plugin, has created a new (free) plugin to fix site architecture issues that can quietly reduce a website's ability to rank.
Site Architecture
Site architecture is a key element of SEO: an organized website with clear navigation helps users quickly get to the content and products they're looking for, and it also helps Google find and rank your most important pages.
A normal and common sense way to organize a website is by topic category. Some SEO newbies think that organizing your site by topic is an SEO strategy, but it's just common sense. Organizing your site by topic category organizes your site in a way that makes it easy to drill down and find something specific.
Tags: Contextual Site Navigation
Another way to organize your website is to use contextual navigation. Contextual navigation is a way to provide your site visitors with links to other web pages that are related to their current web page or interests. One way to provide contextual links is to use the concept of tags. Tags are relevant links to content that may be of interest to your site visitors.
For example, someone browsing a web page about a new song by a pop star might want to read other articles about that singer at that moment. A publisher could create a tag that links to a page that collects all articles about that particular pop singer. It usually doesn't make sense to create entire categories for hundreds of musicians, because that would defeat the purpose of hierarchical site navigation (to make content easy to find).
Tags solve the problem of allowing site visitors to easily navigate to content that they are particularly interested in at the time – this is contextually relevant navigation.
Too much of a good thing isn't always a good thing
Even if you create a long-term plan for organizing your website, it can come undone over time as your website grows and trends die down. Artists that were trendy a few years ago may fall out of favor (as happens often) and people may no longer care about them. But those tags will remain and link to content that is no longer important, defeating the purpose of your site's navigation, which is to link to the content that is most important.
Joost de Valk looked at a (very small) sample of WordPress sites and found that around two-thirds of websites contained duplicate tags, meaning multiple tags linked to the same content, while also generating thin content pages, which are web pages of low value.
In a blog post sharing his findings, he wrote:
“Tags are not used correctly in WordPress. Nearly two-thirds of WordPress websites that use tags use (many) too many tags. This has a significant impact on a site's chances in search engines, especially if the site is large. WordPress websites use tags too much and often forget to display the tags on their site, and their tag pages don't contain any unique content.”
While one could reasonably argue that his findings are not representative of most WordPress sites due to the small sample size, the fact remains that websites can be burdened with duplicate or outdated tags.
The three main tag navigation issues identified by Joost are:
1. Too many tags
He found that some publishers add tags to articles in the hope that they will add more articles to the tag once the article is written, but that often doesn't happen, and the result is that the tag only links to a few articles, sometimes just one article.
2. Some themes lack tagging functionality
The next problem occurs when a website upgrades to a new theme (or a new version of a theme) that does not have the tags functionality. This creates orphaned tag pages. Because there are no links to the tag pages, site visitors cannot reach them. However, because the pages still exist, search engines can find them through the automatically generated XML sitemap.
3. Tag Pages Can Be Thin
The third problem is that many publishers don’t take the time to add meaningful content to their tag pages, resulting in just a page of links with excerpts of articles that are also reproduced on the category page.
Reduce tags plugin
This is where a new WordPress plugin from Joost de Valk comes in. This plugin helps you automatically remove tags that don't link to enough pages and standardize your internal links. The new plugin is called The Fewer Tags WordPress Plugin. It is available in a free version and a paid Pro version.
The free version of the plugin works to automatically remove all tag pages with fewer than 10 posts, but it can also be adjusted to remove pages with 5 posts or less.
Additional features in the Pro version provide more control over tag management, allowing publishers to merge tag pages, automatically create redirects, and send “404 page not found” server responses.
Here is a list of the Pro version perks:
- “Merge and delete unwanted tag pages quickly and easily.
- Instantly create a redirect for the removed tag page in your SEO plugin of choice.
- It includes an online course that will teach you what Joost should do.
- Fix your site's tagging issues for the long term!
- Please uninstall the plugin when you're done!”
Where to download the Fewer Tags plugin
You can download the free version of the plugin here:
Few tags Free By Joost de Valk
More information about the Pro version can be found here.
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