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Reusing category name as tag in different taxonomy

8 June 2018 | 19 Comments | Tags ,

Finding the right structure for your site can be difficult, but it’s an important thing to figure out for your SEO. It’ll not only guide your visitors to the content they’re looking for, but also help the search engines understand what content on your site is most important.

Dividing your content into groups, using categories and tags, is a great way to structure your content. Naming these categories and tags is where it can get difficult, especially if you have several different taxonomies on your site. You’re probably aware that you shouldn’t have a category and a tag with the same name. But what about tags and categories that are in a different taxonomy?

Andrew emailed us his question on site structure and taxonomies:

“I know it’s bad to use a tag that you also use as a category. However is it okay to use the name of a category from one taxonomy as a tag in a different taxonomy?”

Watch the video or read the transcript for the answer!

Is it OK to reuse a category name as a tag in another taxonomy?

“Well, the problem is that the name is also the search term, and if someone searches for that term, which page on your site should they land on? Which is the most important one? How do you tell that to Google?

If you have both, then you have to find a way to link from one to the other and deem one more important and that’s actually hard to do. So if you can avoid it, avoid it. Good luck.”

Read more: What is the difference between tags and categories? »

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Discussion (19)

  1. hi master seo, i have a website with some alternative links, i want to bring up 1 selected link only in google search page. But the unexpected thing just happened on my site, which happens is an alternative link that I do not want to appear, google pagerank position better than the main link. Please best solution from master as well. thank you

  • very helpful post.
    Thank you so much for sharing this.
    category can be used for different purpose i did not have any idea about this.

  • interesting articles.

    thank you for sharing the practice and tips Joost

  • excellent post .. I agree with you Joost . Just avoid this kind of situation and change tagname or category name whichever is not ranked.

  • Awesome Post. Yoast, you are the perfect place where we learn and apply tricks and also Yoast a best plugins

  • Same thing happened to us with tags and product categories. We then deleted the tags and focused on product categories.

  • Very cool!

  • Thanks for sharing informative blog. This will help us a lot.

  • It’s really difficult to find right way if you have tags and categories. Everything depends on language and what you write about and how users research information.

  • Cheers Joost, very good read!

    Regards,
    Christopher

  • That’s why I always suggest planning things earlier because after getting so many posts things get a bit messy to optimize.

  • Thanks for this helpful article. I use Yoast for my blog and its really awesome. Keep up with the good work.

  • so, should i change my tag name as they are same as category name. please help me for my new website.

    • Check out our must read articles about Content SEO