Are WordPress Tags important in SEO?, Do WordPress Tags Help SEO? After more than a decade of ranking WordPress Websites on Google, here’s what I think…
Like Categories, Tags are also used to classify your WordPress Posts but Categories often contain more articles than tags which may just contain one article.
Let’s say you’re in the Food Niche and your write an article on How to Cook Spaghetti and you add the tag ‘cook spaghetti’, which other articles do you think will fit that tag?
This is the reason why Tag pages are often empty and with that here’s the answer to your question…
Do WordPress Tags Help SEO?
The Simplest answer to this question is NO. WordPress Tags do not help your Website’s SEO, if anything they’ll block your important pages from appearing on Search results, this happens when the Tag Page is first indexed before the main article.
I used to have the mindset that the more pages I had on Google Index the more traffic I would get but the real truth is that the more Optimized pages you have in search results the more traffic you’ll get.
What happened to me then was that some of my Tags were being indexed first before the main articles and this made them appear in Google for my target keywords instead of the article I wrote, instead, when the user clicks on the tag page, they have to click on the Article from the feed to access the information they’re looking for.
This degrades user experience and sends bad signals to Google since they are measuring the dwell time and bounce rates of visitors on the page they show on the SERPs.
WordPress Tags have no SEO Benefit and that’s why I’ve deleted every single one of it from all my websites.
How to Remove WordPress Tags from Search Results
To fix the issue I had on my website then, I had to remove all my WordPress Tags from Search Results by adding the noindex tag in my robots.txt file.
The easiest way to do this is to Install the Yoast SEO Plugin and then navigate to Yoast SEO > Search Appearance, then click on the taxonomy tab and toggle the option that discourages search engines from indexing WordPress Tags.
Final Thoughts
WordPress Tags aren’t good for SEO but you shouldn’t delete them because they still help in the Classification of your articles.
If you want to find out whether WordPress Categories help SEO (<– Click This Link to Read the Article).
Here are some WordPress Articles that might interest you:
- Free SEO Plugins for WordPress.
- How to Speed Up WordPress Website.
- Best Themes for Portfolio Website.
- 7 Best WordPress Page Builder Plugins.
If you have any questions on WordPress Tags and how they influence your Website’s SEO, you should feel free to ask me in the comments and I’ll be fast to answer them.
