Alveena Ahmad
The creator of the Yoast SEO plugin, Joost de Valk, has developed a brand-new, free plugin to address an issue with site architecture that can subtly lower a website’s search engine ranking.
Site Architecture
Because a well-structured website with easy navigation enables users to find content and products quickly, site architecture is a crucial SEO component. Additionally, it aids Google in determining which pages are most crucial and how to rank them.
Putting a website into topic categories is the standard and sensible method of organisation. Sorting a website according to topics may seem like an SEO tactic to some inexperienced SEOs, but it’s actually just common sense. Sites that are arranged according to topic categories are easier to navigate and locate particular content on.
Tags: Contextual Site Navigation
Contextual navigation is an additional method of website organization. A technique to provide links to additional webpages that are pertinent to the webpage and the visitor’s current interests is through contextual navigation. Using the Tags concept is one way to provide a contextual link. Links with highly relevant content that site visitors might find interesting are called tags.
For instance, if someone is browsing a webpage featuring a pop star’s newest song, they might be interested in reading more articles about that artist at that precise moment. A publisher can design a tag that directs readers to a page that compiles all of the articles written about that particular pop artist. Generally, the idea behind a hierarchical site navigation system is to make content easy to find; therefore, it makes no sense to create a category dedicated to hundreds of musicians.
The issue of making it simple to navigate to additional content that a single site visitor is specifically interested in at that moment is resolved by tags. It’s navigation that makes sense in context.
Too Many Good Things Isn’t Always Good
When a website expands and trends change, a long-term plan for its organization may be undone. People may lose interest in an artist who was popular a few years ago if they have fallen out of favor, as artists frequently do. However, those tags still exist and point to outdated content, which negates the intention of internal site navigation, which is to direct users to the most crucial content.
After studying a (very small) sample of WordPress websites, Joost de Valk found that roughly two thirds of the sites had overlapping tags, or multiple tags pointing to the same content. These tags also produced thin content pages, or pages with little content.
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.”
Since the sample size was small, it is plausible to argue that the results are not typical of most WordPress websites. Nevertheless, it is still true that out-of-date and overlapping tags can cause problems for websites.
The three primary issues with tag navigation that Joost found are as follows:
1. Too Many Tags
He discovered that when publishers tag an article, they frequently expect to add more articles to the tag once those articles are written. However, this rarely happens, leading to tags that link to only a few or occasionally even just one article.
2. Some Themes Are Missing The Tag Functionality
The second problem arises when websites update to a new theme, or a new version of a theme, without the ability to use tags. As a result, tag pages become orphaned, meaning that users cannot access them because the links to them are broken. However, due to their continued existence, those pages will be found by search engines via the automatically generated XML sitemaps.
3. Tag Pages Can Become Thin Content
Thirdly, a lot of publishers don’t bother to add valuable content to tag pages; instead, they are merely links to article excerpts that are repeated on category pages.
The Fewer Tags Plugin
This is where the new WordPress plugin from Joost de Valk is useful. It helps to normalize internal linking by automatically removing tags that don’t link to enough pages. The Fewer Tags WordPress Plugin is the name of this new plugin. There is a paid Pro version and a free version.
With the free version of the plugin, tag pages with fewer than ten posts are automatically removed; this can be changed to exclude pages with five posts or fewer.
Greater control over tag management is made possible by the Pro version’s additional features, which let publishers combine tag pages, automatically generate redirects, and issue 404 Page Not Found server responses.
The advantages of the Pro version are listed as follows:
- Merge and remove unnecessary tag pages fast and simply.
- Converts removed tag pages to redirects automatically using the SEO plugin of your choice.
includes a course on the internet where Joost walks you through what to do! - Resolve a site’s tag problems over time!
- When you’re finished, uninstall the plugin!
Where To Download Fewer Tags Plugin
The free version of the plugin can be downloaded here:
Fewer Tags Free By Joost de Valk
Read more about the Pro version here.
