What are tags and why are they important?

[KatieC]

I was looking through the list of add-ons and noticed some that are supposed to generate and/or manager tags. I am a newbie to web page management stuff. Could someone explain to me what tags are and why there are important?

 

[Paul B]

Personally I never use them.

They can be used to search/filter content on though: https://xenforo.com/community/tags/

For example: https://xenforo.com/community/tags/xenforo-16/

 

[djbaxter]

Agreed. I think they're a waste of time.

 

[KatieC]

Do they contribute anything to SEO?

 

[beerForo]

Disabled for me

 

[Kintaro]

for example:
filter thread/posts related but in different nodes
filter thread related to a specific version of a software

 

[djbaxter]

Do they contribute anything to SEO?

Not these days.

Ten or twenty years ago, they probably had some value in helping search engine spiders find content, but even then the accuracy of the tags used was an issue and could be spammy. It was more a directing traffic thing and everyone seemed to find it necessary to have tag clouds on their websites. They were ugly as hell. The other equally ugly practice back then was to load up the footer with keywords and links to other parts of the site, for the same reasons.

Today, Googlebot and other search engine spiders don't need any assistance in finding pages on your site as long as your internal navigation is decent (which is true by default in Xenforo). An initial sitemap submitted to your Google Search Console can jump start crawling and it doesn't hurt to have a sitemap submitted daily for a forum (although it isn't essential by any means). Tags and spammy footer links aren't necessary and really don't accomplish anything for SEO. It just adds to the ugly factor.

 

[CJ6]

Thanks for asking. I never use them and have always wondered if I should (for SEO).