New WordPress Plugin Solves Site Navigation Problem via @sejournal, @martinibuster

3 months ago 32

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Joost de Valk, the creator of Yoast SEO plugin, has created a caller (and free) plugin for solving a tract architecture occupation that tin silently diminish a website’s quality to rank.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is an important SEO origin due to the fact that a well-organized website with wide navigation helps users rapidly get to the contented and products they’re looking for. Along the mode it besides helps Google find the astir important pages and fertile them.

The mean and communal consciousness mode to signifier a website is by taxable categories. While immoderate newbie-SEOs judge that organizing a tract by taxable is an SEO strategy, it’s truly conscionable plain aged communal sense. Organizing a tract by taxable categories organizes a tract successful a mode that makes it casual to drill-down and find circumstantial things.

Tags: Contextual Site Navigation

Another mode to signifier a website is done contextual navigation. Contextual navigation is simply a mode to connection a tract visitant links to much webpages that are applicable to the webpage and to their interests successful the moment. The mode to supply a contextual nexus is done the conception of Tags. Tags are powerfully applicable links to contented that tract visitors whitethorn find interesting.

For example, if idiosyncratic is connected a webpage astir a caller opus by a popular prima they whitethorn successful that infinitesimal whitethorn beryllium funny successful speechmaking much articles astir that singer. A steadfast tin make a tag which links to a leafage that collects each nonfiction astir that circumstantial popular singer. Ordinarily it doesn’t marque consciousness to make an full class for hundreds of philharmonic artists due to the fact that that would decision the intent of a hierarchical tract navigation (which is to marque it casual to find content).

Tags lick the occupation of making it casual to navigate to much contented that 1 tract visitant is specifically funny successful astatine that moment. It’s contextually applicable navigation.

Too Many Good Things Isn’t Always Good

Creating a long-range program for organizing a website tin beryllium undone by clip arsenic a website grows and trends wane. An creator that was trending respective years agone whitethorn person dropped retired of favour (as they often do) and radical suffer interest. But those tags remain, linking to contented that isn’t important anymore, defeating the intent of interior tract navigation, which is to nexus to the astir important content.

Joost de Valk researched a (very small) illustration of WordPress sites and discovered that astir 2 thirds of the websites contained overlapping tags, aggregate tags linking to the aforesaid contented portion besides generating bladed contented pages, which are webpages with small value.

A blog station sharing his findings noted:

“Tags are not utilized correctly successful WordPress. Approximately two-thirds of WordPress websites utilizing tags are utilizing (way) excessively galore tags. This has important consequences for a site’s chances successful the hunt engines – particularly if the tract is large. WordPress websites usage excessively galore tags, often hide to show them connected their site, and the tag pages bash not incorporate immoderate unsocial content.”

The illustration size was tiny and a tenable statement tin beryllium made that his findings aren’t typical of astir WordPress sites. But the information remains that websites tin beryllium burdened by overlapping and outdated tags.

Here are the 3 main tag navigation problems that Joost identified:

1. Too Many Tags
He recovered that immoderate publishers adhd a tag to an nonfiction with the anticipation that they volition adhd much articles to that tags erstwhile those articles are written which successful galore cases doesn’t happen, resulting successful tags that nexus to conscionable a fewer articles, sometimes lone to 1 article.

2. Some Themes Are Missing The Tag Functionality
The adjacent contented happens erstwhile websites upgrade to a caller taxable (or a caller mentation of a theme) that doesn’t person the tag functionality. This creates orphaned tag pages, pages that tract visitors can’t scope due to the fact that the links to those tag pages are missing. But due to the fact that those pages inactive beryllium the hunt engines volition find them done the autogenerated XML sitemaps.

3. Tag Pages Can Become Thin Content
The 3rd contented is that galore publishers don’t instrumentality the clip to adhd meaningful contented to tag pages, they’re conscionable pages of links with nonfiction excerpts that are besides reproduced connected class pages.

The Fewer Tags Plugin

This is wherever Joost de Valk’s caller WordPress plugin comes successful handy. What it does is to automatically region tags that aren’t linking to capable pages, which helps to normalize interior linking. This caller plugin is called, The Fewer Tags WordPress Plugin. There’s a escaped mentation and a paid Pro version.

The escaped mentation of the plugin works automatically to region each tag pages that incorporate little than 10 posts, which tin beryllium adjusted to region pages with 5 posts oregon less.

Added functionality of the Pro mentation allows greater power implicit tag absorption truthful that a steadfast tin merge tag pages, automatically make redirects oregon nonstop a 404 Page Not Found server response.

These are the database of benefits for the Pro version:

“Merge & delete unneeded tag pages rapidly & easily.
Creates redirects for removed tag pages connected the fly, successful your SEO plugin of choice.
Includes an online people successful which Joost explains what you should do!
Fix a site’s tag issues long-term!
Uninstall the plugin erstwhile you’re done!”