Today let us talk about tag optimization in WordPress. Many WordPress SEO tutorials recommend blocking search engines from indexing tag archive pages, and many SEO plugins also offer an option to disable indexing for tag archives. Is it really necessary to block search engines from indexing tag pages? The answer depends on the situation.
When should search engines be prevented from indexing tag archive pages?
When WordPress is used as a blog, many themes display full post content on archive pages by default. In that case, tag archive pages can end up containing the same content as single posts or category archives. That is not friendly to search engines, so tag archives should be blocked in that situation.
In other words, only when archive pages display the full content do we need to prevent search engines from indexing tag archive pages.
When is it okay to let search engines index WordPress tag archive pages?
When WordPress archive pages display excerpts instead of full posts, a tag archive page shows only the excerpted content of the posts that share that tag, whether the excerpts are generated automatically or written by hand. In that case, the archive page does not contain enough of any one post to count as duplicate content.
On the contrary, because posts that share the same tag are usually related to one another, and because their excerpts contain keywords related to the tag, the tag archive page becomes a keyword-rich topical page.
So in this situation, a tag page becomes a natural topic page built around the tag as a core keyword. That is helpful to search engines when they try to judge whether content is valuable. In this case, not only should we allow search engines to index tag archive pages, we should also add some links to those tag archives from within our content to encourage search engines to crawl them.
Use tags to build related posts and improve content relationships
According to SEO best practices, related articles on the same site should link to one another. That kind of internal connection also helps improve user experience, increase time on site, and raise page views. For a practical method of building related posts through tags, see the article on this site about using tags to create related posts.
