Is tagging a post in multiple categories bad for your blog?
Following discussions on the web about reducing duplicate content on wordpress blogs, found out a few interesting things. These are things that you may not notice and may assume is normal on a blog. You may even see probloggers practicing such mistakes on their blogs. Well they are unaware of it..but they sure are mistakes
An example is – categorizing an article/post in more than one category. This practice is bad for your blog as it increases the chances of duplicate content on your blog. So Google recommends (Matt Cutts does) that you categorize articlces/posts only in one category at a time. But I’ve seen Darren Rowse tag posts in more than one category on his blog. See his latest post on page rank today. Here he tags the post into two categories. Video Posts and Search Engine Optimization.
Although I believe that it’s good to tag the posts in your blog to one category, seeing top bloggers practice it the other way makes me think… where’s the line to be drawn?
Then how can we safely go about it?
Ashfame’s last blog post..Adobe AIR platform – How good is it?
so what do u say is the best way to use tags and categories.. ??
so does that mean, as long as your blog is not as big as darren’t perhaps sticking to one category for a post is a good idea?
If you do not use category name in permalinks, using multiple categories is safe.
But if you use category in permalinks then a single post may be accessible from two urls. That’s where the duplicate content penalty comes in as the bots see two pages(it’s actually one) which are mirror copy.
Let’s see what Mani Has to say on this !
I think the way to go when considering more than one category is to use tags. Pick the best fit as your category. The best fit probably is the more general of the 2 terms, and becomes a category, or umbrella, for the tags “under” it. Tags add another dimension to categories by giving search engines more information about your post. It also make it easier for your human readers to find your content by different avenues.
Its important to make these considerations when you design your blog’s structure, and when you start posting. However, if you are like myself and many bloggers, your list of categories and tags will continue to grow so, you must choose well before actually publishing your posts.
Using Darren Rose’s ProBlogger post as an example (not correcting him) I would suggest using the category “Search Engine Optimization” OR “Video Posts” – depending whichever one is already a category on your blog. Of course the other would be your tag. If both are categories then its a little trickier, and depends on the categories and tags you are already using. Make the clearest choice or could add that would make good sense given your hierarchy.
Yeah, i think it has negative effect on how google sees your blog, as i observed, my posts with more than one category gets indexed and de-indexed randomly, maybe that’s the downside of it. Not really sure, as I’m just a newbie.
@Amit’s comment is correct in my opinion. If you use a permalink structure that doesn’t include the category name (e.g. /%postname%/) then there is no duplicate content. In other words, you may have one article in multiple category listings but they all resolve to the same URL. The problem occurs when the same article can be accessed at more than one URL.
I can see what you mean Jerry, but wouldn’t that be a disadvantage for seo purposes to not include the category name in the url ?