Category/Tag Pages; count towards site volume?

Muninn

Muninn

New member
Jun 27, 2010
111
1
0
Detroit
I don't use many "tags" on my posts on any of my sites (all of which are wordpress), but was thinking it may be beneficial to start adding more for the purpose of additional site "volume" (as far as I understand it Google does not favor "thin" sites) and more spots for my keywords to be picked up.

By more volume I mean because as you know, for each tag or category added on wordpress there is what seems to be a whole new "page" created for that tag or category. For example, if my site is "yellow widget reviews" and instead of just placing that post in one category and tagging it with the product name, I could tag it with some applicable related keywords that I don't necessarily have a category made for, perhaps "big yellow widgets" (another keyword) which will not only make that page specifically more targeted for that keyword, but will (and tell me if I'm wrong here) create a new page that displays all posts tagged with that keyword. I could then build links pointing at that page ("yellowwidgetreviews.com/tag/big-yellow-widgets/") optimized for that keyword, spreading that link juice among all the posts that contain that tag and effectively giving me a new page for google to index and add to my total of separate pages on the site.

Am I incorrect in this, or is this just something everyone does that I hadn't considered yet? :X Thanks!
 


Adding content for more keywords will help. However, what you are doing is probably going to get you into "duplicate content" problems. You are using the same content on what appears to Google as multiple pages?
 
Jake1125 said:
Adding content for more keywords will help. However, what you are doing is probably going to get you into "duplicate content" problems. You are using the same content on what appears to Google as multiple pages?
Click to expand...

No, what I mean is at least with wordpress if I tag a post "big fat oblong yellow widgets", then a user on my site could click on that tag from my post where it displays what tags the post they're viewing was published with, which will take them to a page like "yellowwidgetreviews.com/tags/big-fat-oblong-yellow-widgets/", which will display any posts that were also published with that tag. I'm saying that it seems like by adding additional, more specific tags, its going to create more of these "index pages" for each tag created and thus add more pages to my site, at least in googles eyes. Not to mention the bonus for the site overall of adding more pages that have those specific keywords right in the URL.

Does this make sense? Again I could be totally incorrect about how I think this works/would work, but that's why I made this post in the first place.
 
Add the tags if it aids the user in navigating around your site. As far as scoring points with Google though, you're not going to get much value out of adding extra tags in order to boost your page count. You're better off just adding more posts.

Anyway, you're better off keeping your site simple & clean rather than cluttering it with a lot of keyword variations on the side navigation from all the tags you've created. If there are specific topics you repeatedly write about then it makes sense to add those as tags.

Oh, and if you really thing any of those tag variations are worthwhile keywords, just create a new post & put it under the blog portion of your site with the keyword as the title. You'll get more benefit from a fresh post with your KW in the title tag rather than stuffing a lot of KW tags on one post.
 
You are correct to a point. What you're talking about is different configurations of the same content (tag archives). You can only stretch this out so much. Google will index and serve pages like this in the SERPs, but if you have too many pages of tag/category/date/author archives they may get tossed into the supplemental listings and your overall site may suffer.

I've had success doing exactly this and haven't had any issues before/after panda. But I typically choose to either index tags or categories - not both. I always disable date based and author categories as well mainly because they aren't relevant to my sites.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom