Joost de Valk, the creator of the Yoast SEO plugin, has developed a new, free plugin designed to address a site architecture issue that can silently impact a website’s ranking potential.
Site Architecture
Site architecture is a crucial SEO factor because a well-organized website with clear navigation helps users quickly access the content and products they’re looking for. It also aids Google in finding and ranking the most important pages.
The common-sense way to organize a website is by topic categories. While some beginner SEOs might see this as an SEO strategy, it’s fundamentally just logical organization. Organizing a site by topic categories allows for easy navigation and specific content discovery.
Tags: Contextual Site Navigation
Another method to organize a website is through contextual navigation. This approach offers visitors links to more webpages relevant to their current interests. Contextual links are created using Tags, which direct users to content they might find engaging.
For instance, if a user is on a webpage about a new song by a pop star, they might want to read more articles about that singer. A publisher can create a tag that links to a page compiling every article about that specific pop singer. Creating an entire category for numerous musical artists can complicate hierarchical site navigation, which aims to simplify content discovery.
Tags offer a solution by enabling easy navigation to additional relevant content, tailored to the visitor’s immediate interests.
Too Many Good Things Isn’t Always Good
A well-planned site organization can deteriorate over time as websites expand and trends shift. An artist once popular may lose relevance, leading to outdated tags linking to less important content. This undermines internal site navigation’s goal of highlighting crucial content.
Joost de Valk’s research on a small sample of WordPress sites revealed that about two-thirds contain overlapping tags, linking to the same content and generating thin content pages with little value.
A blog post sharing his findings noted:
“Tags are not used correctly in WordPress. Approximately two-thirds of WordPress websites using tags are using (way) too many tags. This has significant consequences for a site’s chances in the search engines – especially if the site is large. WordPress websites use too many tags, often forget to display them on their site, and the tag pages do not contain any unique content.”
Despite the small sample size, the findings highlight the problem of overlapping and outdated tags.
Three Main Tag Navigation Problems Identified:
1. Too Many Tags:
Some publishers add tags to articles with the expectation of future content that doesn’t materialize, resulting in tags linking to just a few or even one article.
2. Missing Tag Functionality in Some Themes:
Upgrading to a new theme that lacks tag functionality creates orphaned tag pages. These pages are no longer linked from the site but are still indexed by search engines via the autogenerated XML sitemaps.
3. Tag Pages Becoming Thin Content:
Many tag pages are merely lists of links with excerpts, duplicated on category pages, offering little unique content.
The Fewer Tags Plugin
Joost de Valk’s new WordPress plugin, the Fewer Tags WordPress Plugin, addresses these issues. It automatically removes tags not linking to enough pages, helping to normalize internal linking. The plugin is available in both free and paid Pro versions.
The free version removes all tag pages with less than ten posts (adjustable to five posts or less). The Pro version offers advanced tag management features, like merging tag pages, creating redirects, and sending 404 Page Not Found responses.
Pro Version Benefits:
- Merge & delete unneeded tag pages quickly & easily.
- Creates redirects for removed tag pages in your SEO plugin of choice.
- Includes an online course explaining tag management.
- Fix a site’s tag issues long-term.
- Uninstall the plugin when done!
Where To Download Fewer Tags Plugin
The free version of the plugin can be downloaded by searching for "Fewer Tags Free By Joost de Valk." More information about the Pro version can be found on related websites.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Simple Line
