Joost de Valk, the creator of the Yoast SEO plugin, has created a new (and free) plugin to solve a site architecture issue that can silently decrease a website’s ability to rank.
Site architecture
Site architecture is an important SEO factor because a well-organized website with clear navigation helps users quickly access the content and products they are looking for. Along the way, it also helps Google find the most important pages and rank them.
The normal and common sense way to organize a website is by subject categories. While some SEO newbies think that organizing a site by topic is an SEO strategy, it’s actually just plain old common sense. Organizing a site by topic categories organizes a site so that it’s easy to explore and find specific things.
Tags: Site contextual navigation
Another way to organize a website is through contextual navigation. Contextual navigation is a way to provide the site visitor with links to more web pages that are relevant to the web page and their interests at the time. The way to provide a contextual link is through the concept of tags. Tags are highly relevant links to content that site visitors may find interesting.
For example, if someone is on a web page about a new song by a pop star, they may be interested in reading more articles about that singer at that time. An editor can create a tag that links to a page that collects all articles about that specific pop singer. It usually doesn’t make sense to create an entire category for hundreds of music artists because that would defeat the purpose of a hierarchical site navigation (which is to make content easier to find).
Tags solve the problem of making it easier to navigate to more content that is specifically of interest to a site visitor at that time. It is contextually relevant navigation.
Too much of a good thing is not always a good thing
Creating a long-term plan for organizing a website can be undone over time as a website grows and trends decline. An artist that was trending a few years ago may have fallen out of favor (as it often does) and people lose interest. But those tags remain, linking to content that is no longer important, defeating the purpose of the site’s internal navigation, which is to link to the most important content.
Joost de Valk investigated a (very small) sample of WordPress sites and found that about two-thirds of websites contained overlapping tags, multiple tags linking to the same content while generating thin content pages, which are web pages with little value
A blog post sharing their findings noted:
“Tags are not used correctly in WordPress. About two-thirds of WordPress websites that use tags use (way) too many tags. This has major consequences for a site’s chances in search engines, especially if the site is large. WordPress websites use too many tags, often forget to display them on their site, and tag pages contain no unique content.”
The sample size was small and it can be reasonably argued that their findings are not representative of most WordPress sites. But the fact is that websites can be loaded with overlapping and outdated tags.
Here are the top three tag navigation issues that Joost identified:
1. Too many labels
He found that some editors add a tag to an article in the hope that they will add more articles to those tags when those articles are written, which in many cases does not happen, resulting in tags that link to only a few articles, from times only to one article.
2. Some themes do not have tag functionality
The next problem occurs when websites update a new theme (or a new version of a theme) that doesn’t have tag functionality. This creates orphaned tag pages, pages that site visitors cannot access because the links to those tag pages are missing. But because these pages still exist, search engines will find them through automatically generated XML sitemaps.
3. Tag pages can become thin content
The third problem is that many publishers don’t take the time to add meaningful content to tag pages, they are just link pages with article snippets that are also reproduced on category pages.
Use fewer tags
This is where Valk’s new Joost WordPress plugin comes in handy. What it does is automatically remove tags that don’t link to enough pages, which helps normalize internal linking. This new plugin is called, The Fewer Tags WordPress Plugin. There is a free version and a paid Pro version.
The free version of the plugin works automatically to remove all tag pages that contain less than ten posts, which can be adjusted to remove pages with five posts or less.
The added functionality of the Pro version allows greater control over tag management so that an editor can combine tag pages, automatically create redirects, or send a 404 Page Not Found server response.
Here is the list of benefits for the Pro version:
“Merge and remove unnecessary tag pages quickly and easily. Create redirects for removed tag pages on the fly, in the SEO plugin of your choice. Includes an online course where Joost explains what to do! Fix a site’s tag issues in the long run! Uninstall the plugin when you’re done!”
Where to download the less tags plugin
The free version of the plugin can be downloaded here:
Less free tags by Joost de Valk
Read more about the Pro version here.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Simple Line
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