This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Syed from Kerala, India, who writes:
“Should we use tags in blog posts? Do blog tags help with SEO?”
Thanks for your awesome question, Syed!
I get a lot, especially speaking at influencer and blogging conferences.
In almost all cases, the answer is no. Don’t use blog tags.
If you’ve done the work of creating user-friendly categories and subcategories, it might not be necessary.
Before we dive into why, this is an exception to using blog tags – but it’s not for SEO purposes.
If you have active readers who use blog tags to interact with your site, such as shoppers who frequently click the tags to find out more information related informationand those same users increase your pageviews without bouncing, and then the tags add value.
In some cases, you may find that you are actually driving SEO traffic to tagged pages. This is where we enter the “specific situation” category.
I would make a decision and have a plan that probably won’t work for most other sites.
Since this isn’t a general answer and you didn’t provide your website, I’ll avoid going into detail.
Note that we’re talking about a blog and not an e-commerce store.
Ecommerce stores can use tags for data feeds, sorting, creating subfolders and catalogs, and more.
This can be handled differently using metabots and other tools.
They are now a necessary evil for e-commerce, but not for bloggers.
For blogs that use tags, I highly recommend applying metarobots noindex, following tags.
The reason for noindex, follow tags is that tags usually lead to Thin, copy, or a competing copy. Even if you have proper canonical links, you don’t want to waste Google’s crawling, and you can have relevant internal links to follow.
Because you want your internal links to be followed, you use follow instead of nofollow after noindex.
Blog tags, in most cases:
- Generate unique pages that may compete with major categories and articles, as they are short variations on the same topic. Older sites may not have a “read more” type of functionality, which makes for a weird user experience when full posts and bios appear in the reading pane.
- Compete with other labels If the keywords are too similar, cannibalize them.
- Tag pages that contain a large number of articles or only a few articles.These pages are Might not be a good user experience for someone to log in Search from google. However, articles on category pages can be a better experience.
- wasting your crawl budget. If you have 100 posts and 1,000 tags, search engine spiders can get lost in a vast web of tags, and those same tags can disrupt proper site structure.
- Add extra links to the body, sidebar or main section of the page This “theoretically” dilutes the authority that each internal link can pass. I’m not too worried about this, but I’m throwing it here because other people I talk to feel strongly about it.
- If your topic has important tags, you might write a dedicated post for it and group it into a blog category.there is one Dedicated posts for tags/keywords are a better experience For website visitors, it makes sense for search engines to show up in search results.
A few years ago, hashtags were fine and bloggers would use them.
But now they’re more spammy, produce thin pages, cannibalize keywords, and can hurt your crawl budget.
Unless you’re a publisher who makes money from page views and tags make a lot of money for you, I wouldn’t recommend using them.
When using the proper site structure (including categories, subcategories, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, internal links, and navigation elements), you’re probably best off focusing on your categories and blog posts.
I hope this helps answer your question. This is a great one!
Many people often ask the same question.
More resources:
Ask about SEO is a weekly SEO advice column written by the industry’s top SEO experts handpicked by Search Engine Magazine. Have questions about SEO? fill out our form. You may see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!
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