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We run a WordPress blog with almost 94.000 post tags, spread over 5000 posts, and only 20.000 of these post tags are actually attached to more than one post, hence 74.000 of the total number of tags are used for one post exclusively.

My pal who produced most of these tags, is firmly convinced that these tags improve our site's SEO, which I absolutely doubt. He creates 20-30 new tags per post and hardly uses existing tags.

I mean, even if all of these tag archives are indexed by Google, I cannot imagine that it really helps with Google ranking when having >70.000 one-post-archives. If you stop indexing taxonomies archives I think it becomes irrelevant at all anyway.

Can you prove me if I'm wrong? It really has become a big problem since all plugins result in a blank page when trying to filter by tags. I guess the bulk of tags is far to big right now.

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    Your friend has been reading too many BS SEO blogs. Most all of the online SEO advice is pure unadulterated junk. There are some benefits of having tags, of course, but not if there are no or little posts attached to them. In that way, your friend has missed the boat.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Oct 16, 2015 at 0:47
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    post tags are used to increase the user performances on our websites. it wont help in SERP.
    – praveenoy
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 6:49
  • I'd give you a plus one to your post, but really, it's clear that 94,000 tags is just not a good idea. More tags than you have posts... It should always be the other way around if you even use tags in the first place. (they can be more detrimental, I think, than beneficial.)
    – Alexis Wilke
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 9:20

3 Answers 3

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One of the biggest problems here is this part:

74.000 of the total number of tags are used for one post exclusively

That's totally wrong and suicidal approach.

Tagging shouldn’t be done half-heartedly – each one should be carefully considered, and that takes time. Furthermore, you will need to set aside a few minutes perhaps every month or so to manage your tags. You will be merging duplicate tags and deleting overused/underused tags.

If you do not carry out regular maintenance, you will end up with a bloated list of tags that are useful to no one.

Let me give you an example. Say for instance you run a site about zoo animals which has a particular focus on llamas. If you have a tag page for llamas that links to various pages and has various pages linking back to it, that is a strong indicator to Google that llamas are kind of a big deal on your site.

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Tags in of themselves do nothing for SEO.

The point of a tags list is two fold: one, to help the user sort posts by focused topic of interest; and two, to produce highly targeted landing pages of post links to gain users from search.

If any tag has one, a few, or worse- no posts, then you are actually producing thin or empty landing pages of no value that can degrade your sites performance especially in light of the recent updates looking for thin content.

Another consideration is this. Google is a semantics search engine. If posts are improperly tagged it is very possible to distort the search performance of the post(s) and dissatisfying a search user thus increasing the sites bounce rate. Bounce rate is used to modify how and when a page appears in the SERPs and can drive pages down for important searches. It is important not to trick search engines just for this reason.

In this, your excessive use of tags is really harming your site. As stated in the other answer, you need to consolidate and manage this list carefully and appropriately.

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Now Google does not give importance to tags so using 20-30 per post is not a good approach or even not good from a SEO point of view.

Using multiple tags might can help your website to drive referral traffic but in search point of view, they are creating too much duplicity for your original posts.

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