Anyone found any benefit having tags indexed?

[JoyFreak]

Hi just wondering if anyone has found any benefit from having tags indexed? I’m thinking of adding it to my robots.txt and adding a NoIndex attribute to remove it from search engines entirely to free up crawling budget for important content like threads etc.

 

[djbaxter]

Nope, unless you consider database bloat and a large number of posts with no tags or poorly constructed tags a benefit.

There was a time when tags had a purpose in helping get your site indexed. No longer. Now it's just clutter.

 

[Old Nick]

I’m thinking of adding it to my robots.txt and adding a NoIndex attribute to remove it from search engines entirely

Can you share how to do that please ?

 

[djbaxter]

You don't need to do anything in robots.txt.

Go to Setup >> Options >> Content tagging

Right under the very first option, Enable content tagging, uncheck that box. That turns off tags so it's all you need to do IIRC.

 

[Old Nick]

Oh ok, I did not imagine completely deactivating the function but only preventing google from indexing the tags. But it's an interesting option, why not, maybe I'll let myself be tempted. Is that what you did?
Currently I have a lot of referenced tags, what will become of the links? 404? How to solve this?

 

[djbaxter]

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$35 gets you rights to download any or all of @AndyB's 300-400 addons for a year.

 

[JoyFreak]

Can you share how to do that please ?

Add the following in your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/

In Admin CP > Options > XML sitemap generation > uncheck tag

In the tag_view template add the following, below the title page at the top:

<xf:head option="metaNoindex"><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></xf:head>

 

[Old Nick]

$35 gets you rights to download any or all of @AndyB's 300-400 addons for a year.

I'm already a client of his but deleting the tags won't solve the 404 issue will it?

Add the following in your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/

In Admin CP > Options > XML sitemap generation > uncheck tag

In the tag_view template add the following, below the title page at the top:

<xf:head option="metaNoindex"><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></xf:head>

Thank you @JoyFreak, this method is to continue to use the tags but allows them to no longer be indexed correct?

 

[JoyFreak]

I'm already a client of his but deleting the tags won't solve the 404 issue will it?


Thank you @JoyFreak, this method is to continue to use the tags but allows them to no longer be indexed correct?

Correct.

 

[Chromaniac]

metaNoindex method is better. for some reason google would still show robots.txt blocked links in search result pages.

No page information in search results - Search Console Help

If a Google search result says that no information is available for a page, like this:

support.google.com

 

[JoyFreak]

metaNoindex method is better. for some reason google would still show robots.txt blocked links in search result pages.

No page information in search results - Search Console Help

If a Google search result says that no information is available for a page, like this:

support.google.com

Yeah, use the metaNoindex as a first step and then when the pages drop from Google, add it to your robots.txt to stop those pages being crawled.

 

[Old Nick]

I forgot I had a search forum based on tags, I deleted them all and now my search forum is empty...
I would have done better to break my arm !!

 

[JoyFreak]

I forgot I had a search forum based on tags, I deleted them all and now my search forum is empty...
I would have done better to break my arm !!

I hope you made a backup.
Deleting them wasn’t really necessary unless you wanted to stop using tags altogether.

 

[BassMan]

Hmm, I don't know, but I really like tags. I also use an add-on that autopopulate tags based on thread title and existing tags. If you leave it for users to add them, then you'll have very little of tags. That way I see no use.

I get quite some traffic from tags, just a few days ago I got an email asking about something, and then I realized they have found me via tags on search engine. On one of my forums I also know people search for tags and use them.

Or maybe I'm just fantasizing. Anyway, currently, I'm definitely not thinking about disabling tags.

 

[Old Nick]

Deleting them wasn’t really necessary unless you wanted to stop using tags altogether.

Yes that's the decision I made, ultimately in the operation of the forum they are not very useful: the internal search engine works quite well to find discussions on a specific topic. The tag cloud is not necessarily useful either. I had 1800 different tags and some were only used for one discussion, others were misspelled, etc... On Google I know I have quite a few tags indexed but I guess that dilutes the SEO juice and the links don't point to a discussion but to a search result page.

I had made 2 tags mandatory per discussion but some users, not wanting to rack their brains too much, took two words from the title of the discussion which is not very useful... Moreover in French there is a lot words with accent and if some use vérité and one verite that makes two tags for a single idea and the usefulness again is zero.

 

[Old Nick]

And as a result my sitemap went from 3971 links to 2155.

 

[cdub]

Add the following in your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/

In Admin CP > Options > XML sitemap generation > uncheck tag

In the tag_view template add the following, below the title page at the top:

<xf:head option="metaNoindex"><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></xf:head>

Just added the noindex meta to my tag pages. I wonder how long it'll take for those pages to disappear from google and better ones replace them?

 

[Chromaniac]

this would probably not remove the tag links from the index. for that you would need to add noindex metatag to the tag pages.

Block Search Indexing with 'noindex' | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers

Warning: Don't use a robots.txt file as a means to hide your web pages from Google search results.
If other pages point to your page with descriptive text, Google could still index the URL without visiting the page. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or noindex.

Robots.txt Introduction and Guide | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers

 

[cdub]

this would probably not remove the tag links from the index. for that you would need to add noindex metatag to the tag pages.

Block Search Indexing with 'noindex' | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers



Robots.txt Introduction and Guide | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers

That's what I did

 

[Chromaniac]

ah my bad i must have read some other post. should work i believe in a couple of weeks.