Tags are one of those things I constantly see people using wrong on their WordPress websites.

I think the main source of confusion is that people think they somehow help with SEO (which is not true), or that they’re related to the Meta Keywords Tag which was discontinued a long time ago and you should not be using.

Basically, tags are only used to organize your WordPress posts across different categories.

They only way they would have a positive impact on your website’s SEO is that if they’re used correctly, a well-organized website is technically a positive ranking signal.

But more importantly if you use these incorrectly you can make a mess of your website and hurt your SEO.

What do WordPress Tags Do?

One of the great things WordPress does is create a bunch of pages you need automatically, specifically what are called “Archive Pages.”

Archive pages are basically pages that show a series of your blog posts on them.

Click here for an example of an archive page on my site.

WordPress will automatically create an archive page for each category, each author, date ranges and tags.

These pages are great because they’re all automatic so if your blog has a few major categories WordPress will create archive pages for those categories and these archive pages will only show the posts that belong to their category.

So just by checking off the appropriate categories when you’re making a post WordPress will create archive pages and organize everything for you all automatically.

But every time you create a new tag WordPress will create an archive page for that tag as well and this is where the problems come in.

How Not to Use Tags

One of the most common mistakes I see people make with tags is thinking they’re SEO-related and adding a ton of tags for their business, services or location to every blog post.

For example, a business might be a Functional Medicine doctor in Dallas, Texas and then on every blog post they make they’ll put tags like:

Functional medicine
Natural medicine
Medicine
Dallas
Texas
Functional Medicine in Dallas
Functional Medicine in Texas
Functional Medicine doctor
Functional Medicine treatment
Dallas Functional Medicine
Dallas Functional Medicine doctor
Etc.

This results in WordPress creating a bunch of archive pages for each of these tags.

And if you’re adding these same tags to every post, you now have a ton of identical-looking archive pages that all have the exact same posts on them.

These identical pages look like spam to Google and can trigger an SEO penalty.

There’s no need for a website to have so many identical blog pages and it looks like a low-quality website in Google’s eyes.

Another common mistake I see people make also comes from thinking tags have to do with SEO and that’s adding a ton of tags for keywords related to the blog post.

For example, if someone wrote a blog post about natural treatments for headaches, they might add a bunch of tags like:

Headache
Headaches
Headache treatment
Natural headache treatment
Herbs to help headaches
Migraines
Natural herbs for headaches
Heal headache
Supplements for headaches
Etc.

When you add tags like this WordPress again creates archive pages for each of these.

In this case though there’s probably a bunch of tags that were only used on this one post meaning that they now have a bunch of identical archive pages with just a single post on them.

These little archive pages also look like spam and low-quality content to Google and could also get you an SEO penalty.

How to Use Tags Correctly

So, what do I mean about using tags to organize posts across categories?

Let’s say for example you have a podcast and for every podcast episode you put out you make a post on your website with the show notes, transcript and all that stuff.

Let’s also say that your podcast is currently in its fourth season, and you have four WordPress categories set up for each season.

This is a great way to organize your posts. WordPress will create archive pages for each season and people can jump into a specific season and find a specific post.

But let’s say you sometimes have guests come onto your podcast and you have a few guests who’ve been on a few different episodes across each season.

You could create a tag with the guest’s name and give that tag to each post the guest was on.

Then WordPress will create an archive page for each guest name so if one of your visitors wants to see every episode post from a specific guest there’s an archive page that has all of those.

Here’s another weird example I thought of.

Say your blog post has a category called “Recipes”, a category called “Nutrition”, and a category called “Supplements”.

Then let’s say you wrote a post about a ginger chicken recipe and put that in the Recipe category.

Then you wrote a post about the health benefits of ginger and put that in the Nutrition category.

Finally, you wrote a post reviewing a specific brand of ginger supplements and put that in the Supplement category.

You could then tag each of these three posts with a tag like “Ginger” and then if a site visitor was super interested in reading more about ginger, they’d have an archive page that has all of the ginger-related posts on it.

This is the only way you want to be using tags in WordPress and to be completely honest, 99% of the websites I’ve worked on really don’t need to be using tags at all.

A few categories at most are probably all you need.

In Conclusion

So, to sum everything up, basically every time you create a tag WordPress automatically creates an archive page that has every post with that tag.

This usually results in a ton of unnecessary duplicate or mostly empty archive pages that are signals of a low-quality website and look like spam to Google.

At the end of the day tags have nothing to do with SEO (unless you’re carefully using a few as part of a well-organized website) and if used incorrectly will cause SEO problems for your site.

On pretty much every website I make I pre-emptively disable or noindex those tag archive pages so they won’t cause any problems in the future.

But basically my advice for pretty much everyone is just ignore the tags and your website will probably be much better off.