A frequently overlooked yet immensely valuable part of success in news SEO are your content sections and article tags that indicate your site's Topic Authority.
Do you think that a publisher which its tag pages have a 'Read More' button with javascript (that is it is not an href), and having 20 articles on the page would already build authority for the topic? Or would it be important to let the bot see beyond those 20 articles with proper pagination?
I think it's important to let Google see more than 20 articles on a tag page, so you'll need properly crawlable & indexable pagination. For competitive topics, showing 20 articles isn't enough to demonstrate topical authority, in my opinion.
I have a question. I do SEO on a site which focuses on presenting and selling our realty projects. We do as well write articles on the topic from time to time, but we have a small amount of articles (about 50 in total) that covers huge themes. Below each article we have an article slider with three random other articles to read. If we tag them, I guess the tags would contain around 5-10 articles. Would this be a disadvantage, or will Google compare the number of articles in the tag with the total number of articles? (We have one category page which basically translates to "Articles").
I don't know if you're able to say something meaningful about this concrete example, but
I'm basically wondering if tagging is only relevant for pages with a large scale article production?
Hmm, good question Sian. In that case I would probably still use a small number of tags to help indicate the topics for each article, primarily because you're not targeting news carousels. The tags would still help to signpost the topics of your articles, but I wouldn't expect to see huge payoffs in terms of rankings either.
What about adding an article to more than one categories? I heard it's fine if it actually help the users, but could lead to problems like duplicate content. And what about parent-child categories? any pros and cons?
Having an article in multiple sections & tag pages is no problem at all, it's actually expected behaviour. As long as the article itself does mention the topic of the section/tag with a decent amount of detail, of course.
Same with parent-child categories. It's perfectly fine to have an article in the Rugby category as well as in the Irish Rugby and Ulster Rugby child categories, for example.
Thanks for the post. Recently I've attended the Search Fundamentals workshop which conducted by the Google. In that session, Gary Ilyes from google told that, meta tags or keywords doesn't matter for google for ranking. You can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2SeNePkYB4&t=5272s
So I'm just confused. My question is, will google crawlers browse those keywords to establish the authority of topics or those are just needed for users navigation?
Yes the meta keywords tag indeed doesn't matter. Google ignores it entirely. So if you have a <meta name="keywords" content="..."> meta tag in your HTML code, it will not be used by Google for any purpose.
Users don't see the meta keywords tag either, as it's only in the HTML source of the webpage. So you might as well leave it out. :)
Hi Barry, this is great stuff, thank you! Two questions! 1) All of our articles, regardless of tag/category all live in the same folder (ugh) so our tag pages are currently just a function of internal search (e.g. www.www.com/search?q=Insurance&type=articles) - is there any harm in this?
2) Are there any specific examples of the HTML-esque "sitemap" for tags in a footer you think are done well? Would it be like, say, Search Engine Journal's "Topics" column in their footer? Or more like a directory page that would list all of the tags? Our site's a behemoth and, at last count, there're 215 individual tags applied to varying numbers of articles. I absolutely want to trim those down, but even if we can halve it, that's 100+ tags so the latter seems more feasible than the former (but I don't want to make a directory page if it's not useful). Any thoughts? Thank you!
1. Yes there is harm in this. Internal search functions should NEVER be used to generate tag/category pages. This is incredibly lazy coding. An internal search function should actually be blocked in your site's robots.txt, as it's a potential crawl trap (you could enter any string of characters as a search parameter and generate a new URL, so potentially an infinite amount of crawlable URLs for Googlebot). Using your internal search to artificially create categories and tags is a Very Bad Idea.
2. Having 215 tag pages is not 'behemoth' level - it's a tiny amount. Some of my clients have over 100 000 tag pages. Take a look at the topics HTML sitemap on TheSun.co.uk: https://www.thesun.co.uk/index/ - it's a fairly elegant way to create a crawlable index of your tag pages.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the importance of tagging and categorization for news websites. I was particularly interested in the section on Google News, as I think it's an often overlooked aspect of SEO for news sites. Your tips for optimizing tags and categories for Google News are spot-on and will definitely help improve the visibility and reach of news sites. Thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge on this topic, I will be sure to implement these strategies on my own news website. Keep up the great work!
I'm not a techie so apologies if my question is inept.
What are the consequences if one or more of the topic tags on an article do not relate to the content in any meaningful way?
I ask this question because I've come across this issue a number of times in articles published in an online writing platform (not Substack!), and wondered to what extent it affects discoverability, topic authority etc.
I wouldn't recommend applying topic tags to an article if that article isn't actually about those topics. It sends a confusing signal to Google, and a lot of success in SEO is about not confusing Google. :)
Hi Barry! Thanks again for the article!
Do you think that a publisher which its tag pages have a 'Read More' button with javascript (that is it is not an href), and having 20 articles on the page would already build authority for the topic? Or would it be important to let the bot see beyond those 20 articles with proper pagination?
Thank you :)
I think it's important to let Google see more than 20 articles on a tag page, so you'll need properly crawlable & indexable pagination. For competitive topics, showing 20 articles isn't enough to demonstrate topical authority, in my opinion.
Got it! Thank you Barry! =)
Thank you for this interesting article, Barry :)
I have a question. I do SEO on a site which focuses on presenting and selling our realty projects. We do as well write articles on the topic from time to time, but we have a small amount of articles (about 50 in total) that covers huge themes. Below each article we have an article slider with three random other articles to read. If we tag them, I guess the tags would contain around 5-10 articles. Would this be a disadvantage, or will Google compare the number of articles in the tag with the total number of articles? (We have one category page which basically translates to "Articles").
I don't know if you're able to say something meaningful about this concrete example, but
I'm basically wondering if tagging is only relevant for pages with a large scale article production?
Hmm, good question Sian. In that case I would probably still use a small number of tags to help indicate the topics for each article, primarily because you're not targeting news carousels. The tags would still help to signpost the topics of your articles, but I wouldn't expect to see huge payoffs in terms of rankings either.
Thanks for writing this, very helpful!
What about adding an article to more than one categories? I heard it's fine if it actually help the users, but could lead to problems like duplicate content. And what about parent-child categories? any pros and cons?
Having an article in multiple sections & tag pages is no problem at all, it's actually expected behaviour. As long as the article itself does mention the topic of the section/tag with a decent amount of detail, of course.
Same with parent-child categories. It's perfectly fine to have an article in the Rugby category as well as in the Irish Rugby and Ulster Rugby child categories, for example.
Hi Barry!
Thanks for the post. Recently I've attended the Search Fundamentals workshop which conducted by the Google. In that session, Gary Ilyes from google told that, meta tags or keywords doesn't matter for google for ranking. You can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2SeNePkYB4&t=5272s
So I'm just confused. My question is, will google crawlers browse those keywords to establish the authority of topics or those are just needed for users navigation?
Thank you.
Yes the meta keywords tag indeed doesn't matter. Google ignores it entirely. So if you have a <meta name="keywords" content="..."> meta tag in your HTML code, it will not be used by Google for any purpose.
Users don't see the meta keywords tag either, as it's only in the HTML source of the webpage. So you might as well leave it out. :)
Hi Barry, this is great stuff, thank you! Two questions! 1) All of our articles, regardless of tag/category all live in the same folder (ugh) so our tag pages are currently just a function of internal search (e.g. www.www.com/search?q=Insurance&type=articles) - is there any harm in this?
2) Are there any specific examples of the HTML-esque "sitemap" for tags in a footer you think are done well? Would it be like, say, Search Engine Journal's "Topics" column in their footer? Or more like a directory page that would list all of the tags? Our site's a behemoth and, at last count, there're 215 individual tags applied to varying numbers of articles. I absolutely want to trim those down, but even if we can halve it, that's 100+ tags so the latter seems more feasible than the former (but I don't want to make a directory page if it's not useful). Any thoughts? Thank you!
Hi Anna.
1. Yes there is harm in this. Internal search functions should NEVER be used to generate tag/category pages. This is incredibly lazy coding. An internal search function should actually be blocked in your site's robots.txt, as it's a potential crawl trap (you could enter any string of characters as a search parameter and generate a new URL, so potentially an infinite amount of crawlable URLs for Googlebot). Using your internal search to artificially create categories and tags is a Very Bad Idea.
2. Having 215 tag pages is not 'behemoth' level - it's a tiny amount. Some of my clients have over 100 000 tag pages. Take a look at the topics HTML sitemap on TheSun.co.uk: https://www.thesun.co.uk/index/ - it's a fairly elegant way to create a crawlable index of your tag pages.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the importance of tagging and categorization for news websites. I was particularly interested in the section on Google News, as I think it's an often overlooked aspect of SEO for news sites. Your tips for optimizing tags and categories for Google News are spot-on and will definitely help improve the visibility and reach of news sites. Thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge on this topic, I will be sure to implement these strategies on my own news website. Keep up the great work!
Hi Barry,
Thank you for this informative article.
I'm not a techie so apologies if my question is inept.
What are the consequences if one or more of the topic tags on an article do not relate to the content in any meaningful way?
I ask this question because I've come across this issue a number of times in articles published in an online writing platform (not Substack!), and wondered to what extent it affects discoverability, topic authority etc.
Thank you for your assistance.
Carolyn :)
I wouldn't recommend applying topic tags to an article if that article isn't actually about those topics. It sends a confusing signal to Google, and a lot of success in SEO is about not confusing Google. :)