Is Your Blog Suffering from Category Creep?
In a recent post, Joanna Young, who is in the midst of a blog migration to WordPress, lamented the fact she has more than 70 categories. Now, given the fact blogs are rather experimental and evolutionary by nature, it’s easy to see how that could happen. A couple mistakes I made were –
- Adding subcategories
- Using long category names
Giving me supercalifragilisticexpialidocious URLs like this –
When you look at a blog for the first time, do you review the categories to get a sense of what the blog is about? Are too many or too few a turnoff?
For me, seeing a ton of categories is a bit intimidating. First thought - there’s too much going on here for me to digest. On the other hand, if I see a category that grabs my attention, I’ll click on it immediately and start browsing. But on the other other hand, if there are a hundred categories, or even fifty, I may not bother looking closely at any of them.
From both an SEO and a branding standpoint, it seems to me that a smaller number of categories containing vital keyword phrases is the most effective approach. In both disciplines, repetition is key.
The question is, if you have too many categories on your blog, what can you do about it? What’s the best way to reduce the number, shorten the names, and get rid of subcategories?
Nice post, Brad. Too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say, and same might be the case with so many categories. I guess a dozen or so categories and more tagging will do. Right? By the way our blog just has seven categories.
http://www.socialbridges.org
Regards,
Saad
Hi Saad, Ten or twelve categories is plenty, I think. Yours is good proof - considering the scope of your blog, if you can get by with seven categories, anybody can. Your blog about business development in Pakistan is really interesting. Not the news we normally here in the U.S. about your part of the world, unfortunately. You might enjoy a couple blogs - one of my clients has a sustainable packaging blog -
http://blog.salazarpackaging.com/
And a regular Word Sell reader, Andrew, a teacher living in South Korea, has a corporate responsibility blog -
http://www.goodhonestdollar.com/
Thanks for visiting Word Sell, Saad.
You know, this is something I’ve struggled with since I began. Of course the initial categories were experiments, but now that I’ve got over 600 posts, the idea of going back and narrowing them down is enough to gag me…
But still, I think you have a point. I wouldn’t mind getting my categories down to about 15 or less.
To date, though, I’ve never used tags. Not sure what they’re for. Any suggestions?
Robert, with regard to narrowing categories, I think the big problem there is if you recategorize existing posts, links to those posts are broken. But there may be a workaround to that. Internal tags in WordPress are what generate the tag cloud you see on my sidebar. Even though there’s been a post circulating around the Web that the tag cloud is dead, I kind of like it as another way for readers to browse - what do you think? Beyond that, I’d like to know how tags help, too!
Hi Brad
Thanks for sharing my shame with the internet! I’m down to 12 now. It was hard work, but worth doing as part of the move across to the new blog.
I’ve gone for types of posts this time rather than themes - I think this way it’ll be easier to keep them under control.
I’ll tag instead - though quite why… I’m not entirely sure. I saw some themes that let you search by tag - nice idea. I think they might also come in handy if you ever decide to turn your blog into a a book.
This post on surviving category changes might be of help
http://tinyurl.com/2l26k4
Joanna
Joanna, I do apologize for showcasing you that way. I almost pulled it out, but since you talked about it on your blog as a frustration, I assumed, wrongly perhaps, that you didn’t mind talking about it. I’m sorry. The link to the doshdosh article is exactly right for explaining the right way to manage category changes in WordPress - thank you!
Brad, I was teasing, it’s no problem at all
I’m glad others can learn from my categorical creep
Brad, Though it will on your blog, changing your category structure will not break post links in all cases with WordPress. It depends how the permalink structure is set up.
For example my permalink structure is /postname/postID
Robert’s looks like /postname
Joanna’s seems to be /year/month/postname
Changing categories around won’t break the post links on any of these blogs.
It will break any links that someone has made to one of your categories, but in most cases that is probably a very small number of inbound links.
Chris, thanks for the clarification - sounds like it may have been a mistake to include category names in my permalink structure …?
Brad, arrrggh! Yes! How do you prevent this from happening? I had narrowed down and then added subcategories. I am going to pare again now that I really, really understand the repercussions. My categories are more like slime, fast spreading and gooey!
That’s why I don’t like tags… they spiral out of control, but categories don’t. Maybe it’s me. I studied by blog entries and tried to find common denominators without getting bogged down. I created a Leftover category for those that fit no place else. It’s worked well as I hardly ever use Leftovers.
When I moved to WP, dates got added into the URL and I didn’t like that (long story). I tried to change it — but with over 3000 entries and too many redirects in place… it would make a bigger mess. Seriously, I always copy and paste URLs I want to share with folks — so it’s not a big deal if you can’t memorize it. If I need to memorize it (like my books’ URLs), I use a make shorter URL application to take care of it.
Now about those tags…
Brad, as I understand it, you could change your permalink structure very easily. If you want to reduce the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious effect. The permalinks migration plugin redirects everything from the old structure to the new one.
Joanna
I have around 40 categories and no tags. I’ve always wondered why we would need both options, and I’m still unsure why I’d tag an article that I have categorised. (Any thoughts on that issue appreciated.)
The one issue I have tried to reduce is ‘multi-word’ categories. That way an article can belong in both ‘marketing’ and ‘development’, as each category can have different interpretation/application to any article. Thus subcategories become unnecessary.
Yes, minimal categorisation is a great idea. In keeping with the theme of our individual journal/blog/site, it’s the categories we choose’n'use that place our sites within specific sections of search engines (like Technorati). That said, I try to ensure my category’s are generic and broad.
Here’s how I explain the difference between tags and categories to my clients:
If a blog post is like a file folder, full of information, then your categories are like the drawers you put the posts into. Since you can’t put a file folder into more than one drawer at a time then you probably shouldn’t put a post into more than one category at a time, generally speaking. And it would be a bit of a waste of space to have an entire drawer with only one folder in it.
Following that analogy then tags would be like stickers you’d put on the file folders so you could tell at a glance what you put in the folder. There’s no reason why you can’t put several stickers on the file folder. And you may have stickers that you use only once because that’s the only time you mentioned that specific topic (person/company/idea/etc.) in your blog.
There are a couple advantages to using both categories and tags. Using both well will help your readers (and you) find the right blog post easier when looking for specific information. There is also a strong SEO benefit to using both well.
Tags are little pieces of information that the search engines weigh heavily when ranking web pages. Tagging well will help your posts rank higher.
Oh, and Joanna is right. I changed the permalink structure on my own blog a while back to one I considered more SEO friendly. I used the Advanced Permalinks plugin to automatically redirect my old URLs to the new system.
On BIG word of caution with that plugin is that it is no longer supported by the plugin author. So use it with extreme caution.
I didn’t find another plugin that will do the same thing with a quick Google search. Unfortunately I don’t have time this AM to do a thorough check.
Karen, some of the comments following yours might help you with your slimy category problem. Meryl & Steve, in WordPress, there is a tag prompter that displays tags you’ve already used as you type a tag name into the tag field box on a new post. This is really helpful in terms of preventing “tag creep”. Like Merly, I wonder why dates would be a default setting in a permalink. ?
Joanna and Chris, my question/issue with changing the permalink structure to eliminate categories from the URL is this - if the category name is a keyword, isn’t it beneficial from an SEO standpoint to have that keyword repeated in all those URL’s?
Thanks to all of you for your comments, ideas, and questions!!
I have a tag app now… but didn’t when I first started tagging. So it’s quite a mess. I also don’t like that the tags look at only my posts — I think tags should take folks to another resource like Technorati (mine used to do that, but not anymore). Categories for within your site… tags for external sites.
Hi Meryl, that’s a good distinction about internal vs. external tags. The tags I’ve been thinking about are internal, for helping people search through your blog. Those seem useful to me. I’m not sure how those external tags work … but they seem to be widely used.
Brad, your SEO question is a lively one that is heavily debated in some circles. I guess the question comes down to the SEO advantages of having keywords in the URL vs. the disadvantages of having unwieldy long URLs that dilute the effectiveness of the keywords. I don’t think there is any one “right” answer on that one.
Meryl, I used the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin until WordPress added tagging as a native functionality a while back. UTW did have many more options, including passing tags to Technorati. I’m confident that WP will add in some of that functionality over time.
Chris, Your response here takes a load off my mind - you boiled down the whole SEO question to the basics. Mucho thanks.
Oh boy, I am saving this gem of collaborative learning and community aloha, and rereading it carefully! Thank you Brad for jump-starting this conversation, and mahalo to all who have participated; now 4 years and several blogs into my own online publishing, this subject (and never-ending challenge) of category and tagging creep is a biggie for me. The internal versus external mind-mapping has been somewhat helpful, especially when I’ve dealt with our group blog, Joyful Jubilant Learning, but argh… so much more to learn!
Rosa, internal versus external mind mapping? Where can I learn more about that?
Sorry I didn’t explain Brad! My thought was connected to what Meryl mentioned about considering categories for within your site, and tags for external sites like Technorati, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, and then looking at it empathetically, i.e.
—internally being what I think of as blog administrator (whether sole-blogger or administrator of a group blog like Joyful Jubilant Learning), and then
—externally being if I did a mind-map from a reader’s point of view (or from my participating JJL authors) point of view.
I am primarily a visual learner and thinker, and I like to draw pictures and mindmaps w/good old pencil and paper. As far as categories and tags go, some past blog design mindmaps I have done for Ho‘ohana Publishing have looked like a nightmare, and I knew I had to trim. As a sidenote, doing them in Hawaiian was a big help to me at times, for we use way less Hawaiian words: English is far too adjective-complicated. Come actual “hit publish” time, I’d go back to English after the Hawaiian gave me focus.
The mindmapping has helped me be more objective, because as an author versus an editor, I can get way too emotionally connected to things – even my categories and tags LOL! After much very messy learning on JJL, I finally started using categories very, very sparingly + for authors indexes only (but that is part of a TypePad limitation story).