Tagging Wordpress Categories Was Not Such a Good Idea
December 17th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
Two months ago I tried an experiment. Using a plug-in called Category Tagging I converted all my categories to tags. Upon doing so I saw an immediate effect with Google. My blog was ranking for many more long tail searches and traffic increased quite a bit.
The problem with Category Tagging is that it’s a mess. You may have previously noticed that my Categories were running right down the right column and it was growing with every new post added. Not to mention the fact I found Category Tagging inconvenient because I had to take a few moments to add a new post to multiple Categories.
Today I did some major spring cleaning. I’ve removed the Category Tagging plug-in and installed another one called Ultimate Tag Warrior. I was pleased to see that this new plug-in had an import feature to allow me to import my old Categories back to Tags.
After going into mysql and blowing away all my old Categories (removing each one bit by bit was taking way to long), I added some new general Categories as you can now see on the far right side.
In addition to this, I’ve added a new static page titled Tag Map. It is embedding a real time tag cloud into a template page I created just for this purpose. Doing a Google Image search I found this cool icon 
which I have shrunk down to 32px x 32px and placed it under the RSS feed image.
I have no idea how this will effect my traffic but it cleans up the blog quite a bit. One sweet feature Ultimate Tag Warrior offers that I found super useful while spending the past 2 hours re-tagging all my posts is that there is a “Tag Suggestion” feature which can be found under a post in the admin.
If you click on it, it will pull all relevant tags offering you tag keyword suggestions from Yahoo.
With this tool, you don’t have to guess the tag names. It does it all for you.
December 19th, 2006 03:53
I think you’ve hit on an excellent topic here and one I’ve been thinking about recently. I’ve decided to keep the notion of Wordpress Categories and Technorati Tags as quite independent entities. The Categories can be used by my audience if they want to see a slice of what I’ve written. Any post may have many more Technorati tags since that’s for a different purpose. I’ve applied this approach to all three of my blogs and I’m looking forward to getting many more post views for each visitor. We’ll see how that pans out.
May 25th, 2007 11:12
I had a similar experience as well. Tag clouds have their place in video for sure where there is no code to have keywords, but I just didnt understand how it would benefit me for categories anymore than a standard list.