My question is not related with Classic Press functions but generally with wordpress SEO.
I switched some permanent posts of my website to pages and I categorized them and tagged them with some plugins.
My question is the following.
Do the categories that these ( posts turned to) pages belong and the tags that I retained from their previous post state need to be displayed on the bottom of the pages, as they shown up on my website or this is not needed? Do they work the same for SEO either way or they have to be displayed in order for the search engines to record them?
My XML map is updated.
P.S I don’t mind if they are displayed. In fact I prefer not to be shown on the pages because these are the pages that show my artworks" galleries by subject.
Search engines follow links, so as long as those categories and tags are linked elsewhere on the site (it sounds like they are), then you should be fine.
Category and tag pages aren’t very important for SEO anyway, because they lead to confusing or duplicate content. I’ve seen people disable the category archives and other archive pages completely.
The most important thing you can do for SEO in this case is to make sure the old URL for this content still works (it should serve a 301 redirect to the new URL).
Thank you for the immediate reply.
What do you mean when you say that the categories and tags are linked elsewhere in the site? Do you mean if the posts retained their initial url of that the content of the page is assigned to the proper tags? ( or the other way round, the tags to the content)
Yesterday that I switched these posts into pages I deleted completely the Categories that I had them under because they had become way too many over the years and they were in a complete an utter mess.
But today I read that Categories do count for SEO so I remade two Categories this time with a more general subject. One for paintings and one for sketches.
Then I assigned the posts that became pages under these categories .
As for the tags: Well the tags do matter on SEO. If you search the terms or key words that I have used on the tags the content of my website comes forward immediately at the first pages of the search results. The tags and the image files’ names count also a lot on the ranking of the site on image searches ( which is what interests me most btw).
But my question is if the tags should be displayed, should have to be visible on the pages or not. Does this add something to the SEO or not.
But then… if it doesn’t add anything and it is not needed then why the tags are visible on the posts? What is the point? To mess up the layout of each page and force the readers to scroll down to the end of their days? The tags are not there to help me keep the website neat because It has just 29 articles ( posts or pages). I know where is what and I just update the pages when I need to add something new on their galleries.
I should have prefaced this statement with “I think”. I am not an SEO expert, but it seems like you can ask 20 different SEO people and get 20 different answers to questions like this. If your categories and tags are working for you then by all means continue using them.
This certainly can’t hurt. I think it’s much more important to make sure there are no broken links (when you visit the old URL where these pages used to live, they should still work). I know this is definitely something search engines look at.
There are no broken links because when I switched the posts into pages that didn’t changed their urls.They are the same articles with the same url and the same tags, at the same place but assigned as a different type of article with different properties.
I did that because I wanted to change the appearance of my blog and I didn’t want the changes to be applied all around the website.
So I made static pages the posts that had the galleries and left as they were the blog posts. So now I have a different layout on the website and a different one on the blog.
Brief only and just the way I look at them
Tags do not need to be displayed. Can be a shortcut way to see all posts with that tag. An item can have many tags.
Similar for categories but categories are hierarchical and can be in the url.
Problems arise if item is in several categories, it then has several possible urls. Even if Google recognised this inbound links could still be going to either url. So my preference is any item, (post,image etc.) only has one category
@Marialena.S, I’ve written extensively on how to understand and master the use of categories and tags for both search optimization and interpersonal sanity. This is probably the most definitive information on the topic and I’ve written it specifically around ClassicPress, so, it’s not dated. https://codepotent.com/classicpress-categories-and-tags-demystified/
Both categories and tags can be used in URLs. For example, both of the following could be viable.
https;//site.com/tag/whatever
and https://site.com/category/whatever
However, because you can remove the taxonomy base (ie, /category and /tag,) it doesn’t really matter which you use to sort your content.
Moreover, unless you have thousands of articles, using both categories and tags is not recommended – it will be confusing to visitors, confusing to search engines, and confusing to the site owner. This confusion is needless. And…doing it “wrong” will probably hit your SEO negatively (ie, duplicate content,) so, just choose a method, stick with it, and you’ll be fine.
Thank you for the information that I find just great. I prefer not to have the tags displayed under my images galleries but I want them to exist because search engines check the tags too.
Thank you for the informative article. That was really helpful !
Well it seems that I have done everything as it should be.
I have now 3 categories. One for the blog, one for the artworks and one private for content that I don’t want share.
Now my website has 23 hierarchical placed pages and 14 blog posts that are in a blog page. And countless tags that are related with the content of each different page where each page loads a different image gallery
for the 400 images that I have on my website.
And I’m having also the WP Media Category Management plugin that I use it as a directory for my images but I don’t allow the search engines to scan its categories. I use that simply for my convenience.
It seems that everything is ok now.
It is the most boring task ever but it needs to be done from time to time. Not that much for the tags but for the categories.
Regarding the tags if you bother to check out the list of the tags that you have used from time to time you are going to realize that there are going to be countless tags that are unused, either because you deleted the posts that you have tagged or because you use them once and then you used a similar but slightly different tag to tag similar content.
You’ve got to see the list of my tags that are in four languages. English, Greek, Russian and Chinese too! LOL
