Stop Using Tags with WordPress Now – or at Least so Many

Stop Using Tags with WordPress Now – or at Least so Many

If you ever ventured onto Instagram, you’ll inevitably see a plethora of tags for one image. In fact, you might see so many tags that your head will spin. Hashtag this and hashtag that…everything under the sun to get you to view the image. While that is kind of the idea with such a platform, over-tagging with WordPress is a recipe for disaster.

When it comes to WordPress, using tags should be looked at as if you are creating an organized index. The reason for this is due to Google crawling your page. When you add a tag, you, in essence, add another page for Google to crawl. So, should you decide to use a ton of tags to try and get eyes on a pile of articles, your strategy will actually backfire.

Google will not only look down on the practice of using too many tags with WordPress, but it will also actually penalize you for the action. What this means for you, or more accurately, your website and/or blog, is a downgrade in the rankings as Google will view your over-tagged content as thin in nature. And, when your rankings are downgraded, that means fewer eyes, not more, see your content.

Instead of over linking with WordPress, try being deliberately organized. Think of your content as clothing that needs to be hung up in a closet. You’ll have many hangers to do so, but you would not want so many hangers that you have an overabundance of them. You want all your hangers to fit nicely in the closet, whether they have clothing on them or not. Sure, you’ll have a few spare hangers, but ultimately your room will be clean and organized, and you won’t have so many unused hangers that they litter the floor of the room.

To put this in tag terms – if you have 30 pieces of content, try to limit your tags to around 80 or 90. Enough to get the job done nice and neat and show Google your content is worthy of higher rankings. After all, Google is king, and everyone wants to please the king…so follow the tagging rules and reap the high-ranking rewards.