How to Handle Tag Pages

Tag pages are usually just a collection of posts in a given topic. They can be especially harmful in light of the Google Farmer Algorithm Update. The Farmer update affected sites with auto-generated or low-quality content. Also affected sites with UGC content, and sites with inbound links from the above sites. Page “Quality” has became an important SEO signal.

So, what makes tag pages potentially harmful?

Here’s an example of a Tag page, taken from this Engadget post:

Official From Google: Low Quality Content On a Part of a Site Can Impact a Site’s Ranking As A Whole

Now, think about Tag pages. Think about all the thin and/or empty tag pages from User Generated Content, and UGC tags. Think about all the additional textlinks on a webpage due to tagging… (FYI, It’s a best practice to try to stay at around 100 links per page). Google can crawl over 100 links per page, but every outgoing link bleeds Pagerank of the page, so choose links carefully, from both a value and user experience perspective.

Tag pages are shallow, low quality pages that could lower the overall quality of your entire site. And, that could affect your keyword rankings.

Google has said publically (and privately) that they don’t like tag pages. They think of them as Search Results pages. And, we all know that Google doesn’t like to index Search Results pages. Google can identify Tag pages easily because the URL usually contains /tag/. When Google bought Youtube, they used robots.txt to exclude all their tag pages.

The Solutions:

• Use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.


• Use robots.txt to fully exclude them from being crawled & indexed.


• Remove them from the XML sitemap


• Place them in Javascript. document.write them out. Place Tags in Ajax so they don’t get crawled by the Search Engines.


• Change the URL structure. Use Category or Topic Pages instead of “Tag” Pages. Change the URL to say /category/ or something else. Perhaps /topic/ or /collections/.


• If you must use tags, then limit tag volume, or tier tags based on usage.


• Add unique content to tag pages. Fill the page with evergreen content. Use all types of content. Eg: images, video, text.


• Optimize the Title tag, and H1 tag.


• Link to tag pages contextually.

Share and Enjoy:

Related posts:

1. 404 Page Error Handling


2. Resolving Homepage Canonical Issues


3. Revisiting Javascript Onclick Textlinks

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The Importance of Landing Pages

To make your business website as effective as it can be, it should have landing pages specific to what a prospective customer is looking for.

A landing page is dedicated to one thing – serving up exactly what a person is seeking and making it easy for them to obtain what they want.

Landing pages are extremely important if you are running a PPC campaign. When someone clicks on a link they want to be taken to exactly what was promised in the ad, not to your home page.

The PPC landing page should be simpler in design than your other site pages, with fewer options and a distinct “call to action” – meaning a way for them to easily contact you / download /  purchase your product from that page. It should be designed for your PPC campaign, and my advice is to block search engines from it, since you will have other pages you will want to rank in search results.

Landing Page Effectiveness

The Sherpa marketing chart below shows how effective unique landing pages are for websites.

Effectiveness of Website Design, Management, and Optimization Tactics

If you are not running a PPC campaign, should you still have landing pages on your site? Definitely! In your link building efforts, such as article marketing, your keyword link should connect to a page on your site that is specifically about the article‘s topic.

Sculpting Your Pages

For instance, let’s say you have a site that sells pet products. If you have written and syndicated an article about dog harnesses, the link should lead directly to a page that is about nothing but dog harnesses. Your visitor should be able to get all the info they need about the product from this page, as well as be able to place an order.

You don’t necessarily have to add more pages to your site to do this. Just make sure that the pages on your website that you lead people to are designed to encourage a prospective buyer to do just that – buy your product. It may mean refining some of the pages on your site or breaking down a page that is covering too many products into separate pages for each distinct product.

In other words, don’t have regular collars and leashes featured along with dog harnesses. This is not to say they should not be able to move on to those products. It’s smart to have a “related products” box in a sidebar, but the main page should be about the harnesses you carry…sizes, colors, styles, along with information on how to put them on a dog and why they may be better than a regular collar for your dog.

Along with helping your sales conversions, it will also help the page rank for dog harnesses, since it’s the focus of the page; there is content about the product, pictures of the product with keywords in the name (i.e. cane-corso-dog-harness.jpg) and of course you have used keywords in your title to help the page rank, as well as carefully written a Meta description to encourage searchers to click to your site.

Review Your Website

Your homework for today is to go through your website and see if you need to break down some of your pages into product specific landing pages. Making changes like this is not usually hard or terribly time consuming – especially if you have a template in place. You do need to spend the necessary time it takes to determine the best keywords to use for your title and H tags, write some great content, and again, create a Meta description that will make searchers want to visit your site.

Your reward will be higher search rankings, more visitors, and higher conversions (sales). Nothing wrong with that!

© Kay Frenzer-Zeeh - visit SEO Diva for more great content.

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