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All right, let's talk about blog categories

The Real Role Of Categories

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and tags. And by categories and tags, I mean the actual when you have a blog, you assign each post, hopefully, to a category. And you might also assign tags to that blog post. So each blog post will probably be in at least one category. It may also have one or two or several different tags. So I'm going to talk about how you want to do that for best practice SEO, because I see a very common mistake with these. In the people who begin mentoring programs with me, I would say this is this happens to well over probably half the number of people who begin that program. And I would think it's probably closer to 80 or even 90% of students doing this. And the reason you want to get this straight is because this can be a spam signal to Google. If you do, again, what I see the majority of people doing, it is literally like raising your hand to Google and saying to Google, hey Google, look at me. I'm trying to spam your system by doing this thing with my tags and categories. And that has the effect of demoting your website across

Why Keyworded Taxonomies Flag Spam

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all rankings in Google. I've mentioned before on this podcast the people, the team of people at Google who are in charge of determining the rankings. So what site comes up on the first page and number one on position number 100 on page 10, and which sites are on number 100,000. The name of the team of people at Google is the spam team. So it's not the uh let's find awesome websites and put them at the top of rankings team. It is literally the spam team, and their job is to go out and find websites that are doing things like I'm going to share with you in a second and say, hey, that site gets demoted. It's trying to trick our system. So it's something you clearly don't want to do if your objective is to get better rankings. And the reason that people do this, at least usually what they tell me when we sit down and begin looking at their website, the reason they do this is because it's one of those tips out there. Other SEO prof I'm using air quotes here, other SEO professionals, SEO, I don't know what to call them, they say that you should use your keywords in your blog categories and tags. Now let's look at why first that is not true. I've said that this is literally like raising your hand. It's a spam signal to Google. Let's look at why that is. All right, so let's take just as an example, categories. We're going to take categories first. What is a category? There is no new content in a category. A category is a combination of blogs that are all about a similar topic. Okay, there is no new content there. There is nothing new for Google to index. And by stuffing your keywords into your category

Categories Contain No New Content

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names, you are signaling to Google, hey, I am taking my keywords and I'm trying to create a page out of nothing, i.e. a category page. Remember, there's nothing there, and I'm trying to show that I have more content for that keyword. And the same is true for tags. So let's take a look. Tags are the same, they're very similar. Anyway, when you create a blog on whatever platform you're using, you're usually going to, within that blog editor page, you're going to pick a category, and you'll probably pick some tags. Now, like I said earlier, you can pick several different tags for the same blog. And again, I see the same thing happening. People have received the advice that you should put your keywords into your tags. And so I see websites with dozens and dozens of different tags. And then those tags are just generic things like family photography or wedding photography. Okay. That is super bad for SEO, especially if you're doing the same thing with categories. I have seen this many times too. People will have all their keywords, they'll have tags aligned with their keywords, and they'll also have categories aligned with their keywords. If you're doing that, you gotta stop that right away. Now, in the mentoring program, I go through and

Tags Repeat The Same Mistake

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I sit down with students and we figure out what to use instead, what to use exactly for their categories and tags. But the first step is probably going to be just to get rid of your tags and minimize the number of categories that you have, most likely. And when you do that, think about tags and categories like this. I actually had a student share this quote with me. I don't know where they heard it, but it's difficult conceptually to explain how to use tags and categories, what you would want to use them for. But this example I think is the best I've heard. Okay, let's imagine a clothing store, let's say the gap. What happens when you walk into the gap? There are going to be categories. Generally, there's going to be, just for example, men's and women's. Okay, those are two categories. And some other categories might be outerwear. Uh something else might be tops and bottoms. Okay, there are there are different ways you would want to arrange those categories, and you might have you know categories that are you know subcategories of another, but think of categories like you walk into the store and there are usually signs hanging from the ceiling or something, and you can look at those signs and figure out where you want to go. I want to go to

The Gap Analogy For Structure

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the men's sleepwear, for example. Okay, that's a category. Tags would be something like denim. Okay, there could be denim in the men's section, and there could be denim in the women's section. Could be in the section for pants, could be in the section for jackets. It's something that is not tied to a specific category, but someone might like denim, for example, let's say, and they want to somehow instantly know what all the denim products. I want to see all the denim products. Actually, you can probably see this in action if you go to a clothing store website like The Gap, and on the top are probably going to be the categories, men's outerwear, you know, et cetera. And then the tags are going to be like those filters that you might see on one of the sides. So if you're looking at pants, the sizes might be, you know, 32, 33, 34. It might be slim cut, uh, baggy cut, uh traditional cut, et cetera. I'm talking about men's pants here. Okay, so conceptually, that's how I would approach it. Now, back to my point. If you have put keywords, if you're using your what you think are your keywords in your tag names or and or in your category names, I would say first step, get rid of those tags. Okay, that you you do not want them, they're not helpful for people. It's just at that point you're creating basically duplicate navigation. It's just more confusing than anything for people. And on top of that, like I said, you are sending a spam signal, effectively trying to get Google's attention and point out the fact that you are trying to spam their system. So you are most likely, if you're doing this, you are most likely better off with no tags

Ditch Duplicative Tags Now

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at all than tags that just duplicate your keywords or tags that duplicate your categories. Then you want to think about what to make your categories. How do you want to use your categories? What is going to be appropriate for your business? That's what we cover in the mentoring program. We sit down and we figure out exactly what those should be. But I hope that this is helpful. If you are doing this, certainly if you're using keywords in both your tags and categories, or even just your tags, that's something you want to do. I would say fix that relatively soon. I would say put that at the list of your the top of your SEO list of things to do. And it is possible that you might see a short term decline in visibility. If you're looking at Google Search Console, you might see a short term decline in visibility, fewer impressions. And if you do, I would say that's okay. In a situation like that, what you have done is you've taken a step backward before you can take two steps forward. Okay, I hope this helps.