Written on March 19th, 2007 at 06:03 am by Darren Rowse
How Many Categories Does Your Blog Have?
Time for a little discussion question that emerged out of a conversation that I had with a new blogger recently.
How many categories does your blog have?
I’d also be interested to hear how people determined what categories to use and whether you can have too many categories (I was reading a blog the other day that had 60 and wondered whether there comes a time when there are too many).
100 Responses to “How Many Categories Does Your Blog Have?”
David Wilkinson
March 19th, 2007 6:20 am
*goes to check*
18 at present - including the commonly used ‘Uncategorized’ category for when I foget to add a category to one of my posts. ;) That seems to be happening increasingly often. Perhaps I should go back over them and make them more SEO friendly. (More user friendly too, perhaps?)
Arjun Muralidharan
March 19th, 2007 6:41 am
I think it’s very easy to over-categorize. Your categories should focus on the key areas of interest of your blog. Categories best reflect the kind of content you have, and the kind of content you have the most of. So if you have 45 posts dealing with photography, a corresponding category should be made, while 3 posts on bathroom hygiene don’t necessarily qualify.
Keeping your categories concise and to the point helps navigation, and shows your personal focus for the blog.
Rehuel
March 19th, 2007 6:52 am
I have 8 categories now. It may grow to 10, but I don’t think too much more than that.
As a web designer I have to categorize information for client websites often, so I am constantly working on categorizing.
It all depends on the type of information one is providing and the amount. If I would write 1 article about hosting, I would not have a hosting category, but place that article under Basics. The more articles there are about 1 topic, the more the need exists to create a separate category for that topic.
In light of the above, I don’t think it’s wrong to have 50 categories, if they all have an average of 20 articles. But if your total of posts is 50, its not even advisable to have 25 categories, IMHO.
Hannes Johnson
March 19th, 2007 6:52 am
When I started my newest blog I was thinking that I didn’t want to have too many categories - and I made a list with the categories I wanted to have. Well, as my blog has “evolved” I’ve added a couple of categories that weren’t on the original list… Right now I have 14 categories which I don’t think is too much - but I’m going to be careful not to add a lot more categories.
Some of my categories are “broad” categories while others are a bit more specific - if I’ll add more categories I’ll definitely try to make them as broad as I can.
60 categories is definitely too much - but some people might be doing that because Technorati usually grabs categories as “tags”. But instead of creating 100s of categories people should just use Technorati tag links in their posts - that should do the trick.
Selecting good categories is important to your blog - it can bring you some nice traffic through the search engines and it can increase page views (with something like “read more about this subject…”) - some people might only be interested in one of the topics you blog about.
engtech
March 19th, 2007 6:56 am
700.
Because wordpress doesn’t get the difference between categories/tags right. :)
Realistically it’s around 20, and I should take the time to up date them with how the focus of my blog has changed over the past year.
I don’t use the wordpress category widget for my sidebar, I use static HTML which gives me greater control.
Allan
March 19th, 2007 7:23 am
Hi Darren,
My web log has less than 10, not visible categories; since I’ve not activated them.
‘Categories’ on a general platform, should be basically focussed on the ‘to-be-conveyed-message’ of a blog post. For e.g.: Pro Blogger Archieves (subject centric titles).
Unlike Wordpress, where one doesn’t have control over the un-ending list of categories, Blogger has a much simplified and easier method of categorizing Blog posts.
That’s my take!
Allan.
stubsy
March 19th, 2007 7:26 am
I read a post on here by Darren Rowse the other day which said you should try not to choose too wide a subject for your blog.
I was worried cash would be to wide a subject for my site on which I try and ramble about debt, investing etc. I have 3 Categories at present, to have 700 that must be a pretty diverse blog.
thibault
March 19th, 2007 7:32 am
I think that 5 or 6 categories is a good number, as the human eye can catch 5 elements in one time, but no more.
You can make an experiment : try to draw 4 points in a piece of paper, and ask a friend to count them. He will give you the right answer in a tenth of a second, because his eyes can catch them immediatly. It should be the same with 5 points. But he will certainly need 1 or 2 seconds to give the right answer with 6 or 7 points, because he have to count them.
So when a reader is looking for a word in five categories, he will find it immediatly, whereas he will have to check them one by one if they are more than 6 or 7.
However, it is hard to categorize a blog in only 5 elements, so I think it could be clever to use both categories and a tag cloud.
Yehuda Berlinger
March 19th, 2007 8:00 am
Well, I’ll throw in a dissenting voice.
I have a hierarchal set of categories: a few main ones, more specific ones under these, and very specific ones under those. In total, over a hundred, so far.
Maybe that’s because it works for my blog, which is about games (mostly). Posts about game are tagged ‘gaming’. Then they are tagged ‘board games’, ‘computer games’, and so on. Then they are tagged by individual game.
This way, someone only interested in computer games read only those posts, while someone only interested in the board game Setters of Catan reads only that.
A better question is how many tags do I list on my sidebar. Right now, it is any tag with more than 20 posts, but I’ll probably up that to 30 sometime soon
I also posted a guide to my tagging when I first started to do so, and I’ll probably post another one soon and make is a permanent post.
Yehuda
Stan Schroeder
March 19th, 2007 8:02 am
Two. News, and features. Tags take care of the rest.
Richard
March 19th, 2007 8:16 am
On a general personal blog about 60. (often with little in common)
On product specific blogs about 20.- easier to keep focused
I learnt its better if your blog has a niche,. rather than having everything that appeals to yourself.
Wictor
March 19th, 2007 8:17 am
I have 34 categories/tags of which about 10 is uesd frequently.
The distinction/difference/similarity of tags and categories is a bit fuzzy I think.
Jen
March 19th, 2007 8:17 am
Well, since the ever-idiosyncratic Blogger limits the number of posts it will display under any one “label” (where labels = both categories and tags in function), any attempt to limit the number of categories will serve only to consign older posts to obscurity… especially since Google seems to serve up label pages that contain “post x” in preference to the actual post x page. Perplexing…
As a consequence, I chose to slap on a search box and label as the spirit moves, liberally so. That said, I don’t list all those dozens of labels/categories/tags in a sidebar — that would be too much of a good thing. Links at the end of the post can guide the interested reader in a gentle way to other posts of interest. Not a perfect system, but…
Andrew Ferguson
March 19th, 2007 8:25 am
I currently have six categories. I don’t really see a need to specify beyond that.
If you have to then one of two things is happening:
1. Your search functionality is trash and you’re substituting categories/tagging.
2.Your blog is unfocused.
Shedwa
March 19th, 2007 8:32 am
I have 10 categories now. I determine categories based on the topics I post on, but try to generalize them enough that each category will have a decent amount of posts regularly. As others have said before, I think if you have a ton of categories it shows that your blog is unfocused.
Shawn
March 19th, 2007 8:36 am
I have 8. I use 1. I’m deleting the other 7. How’s that for simplifying things.
Blue Collar Muse
March 19th, 2007 8:44 am
Darren -
This sort of post is why I subscribed to ProBlogger. Thanks.
I currently have 28 categories and have deleted a few before today and will likely delete a few more in the days ahead. One thing I’ve always wondered is the difference between ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. I’ll be looking into that a little deeper to see if I can’t eliminate a few more categories.
On a related note, something I did was add a ZoomCloud just below my Categories list. Obviously the Categories reflects what I choose to identify as what I blog about. The ZoomCloud reflects what I actually blog about by vocabulary. It’s been interesting to see the differences in the two lists.
I get some activity with people clicking through the cloud so it seems to work better than the categories as a user locater of content on the blog.
Thanks again for ProBlogger. While I’ve only been reading here a very short while, it’s already proven to be helpful.
Blue Collar Muse
Vinod Ponmanadiyil
March 19th, 2007 8:44 am
Categories are not so easy to maintain. You can try ‘tagging’ as I do.
Jeff
March 19th, 2007 8:57 am
One of my blogs has a lot of haphazard categories that came about naturally. It could really benefit from a clean up since I’m sure a lot of them could be combined.
My other blog has a list of ten or so categories that I planned out. It’s a parenting blog, so I wanted to get things into nice, neat categories for people looking for tips (ie. safety, nutrition, etc.)
http://365parents.com
Wauks
March 19th, 2007 9:07 am
I run a gaming/MMORPG blog and I have less than 10 categories. Anything in excess is bad, hehehe. But then again, Chris Anderson would probably disagree (Long Tail author).
Neil Galloway
March 19th, 2007 9:11 am
This is a tough one. I have 8 right now. But they span a wide variety of topics which can be a problem. I started my blog a while ago and planned on writing about whatever I felt like to see where I would end up. Afterwards I would focus on that.
Unfortunately, I have written evenly across my categories so I’m still in limbo. My traffic is picking up, but I am thinking I might need to focus myself more.
The thing with categories is they need to by outline an area of interest. I have been to some sites with a ridiculous number of categories and you just get lost and there aren’t many postings in each one anyways.
For me, a category is a place where you can write at least one quality posting on a consistent basic. Some theme that can be kept up, unless the topic is outdated or archived.
Stephen Collins
March 19th, 2007 9:11 am
I’ve taken a somewhat different approach with my blog - one that I think better supports low category volumes (I have just three) but allow me to tag posts as I see fit. What I’ve done is have, as I sad, just three categories:
- posts for general writing
- asides for the small pointer/comment/that’s cool things
- noteworthy for those pieces I think are especially worth returning to
However, I also make significant use of Ultimate Tag Warrior (thus, I am a Wordpress user) and use the folksonomy generated by the tags as pointers into clusters of similar topic material.
This approach keeps my category list very light and allows me to go back a couple of times a year and prune my tags. I usually end up clearing out 15-20 which have ended up being too close to others. Which reminds me, it’s about time I did the housekeeping…
Friedbeef
March 19th, 2007 9:15 am
I limit myself to 7. Have one miscellaneous category. It helps
Jeff Buscher
March 19th, 2007 9:15 am
>1000.
I’m with Engtech. My blog really doesn’t have a niche, so categories we difficult to manage. I scrapped them and started using Ultimate Tag Warrior for Wordpress, and it was cool to find out what my blog is about. Tags work really well for me.
bill
March 19th, 2007 9:16 am
I currently have 16 categories and try my hardest not to add any more unless I must. I think a lot of people make the mistake of interchanging categories with tags - which can lead to huge category lists.
Generally speaking I think the categories should be limited to the main parent topics that you touch on commonly. If you’re blogging on entertainment you might go with “tv, music, movies” and then just use tags like “rock, country, drama and comedy” to break them down.
When I’m building a new blog I try to map out my categories and then I leave them be. When writing a new post I basically think to myself - hey, if this doesn’t belong in an existing category then does it really belong?
That’s one reason I also keep a “Misc” or “Random” category just in case. Sometimes you need a random post that isn’t categorized easily.
Meg
March 19th, 2007 9:28 am
I have over 80!
As I run an online business directory it could well be an occupational hazard - I’d *hate* someone not to be able to find what they were looking for ;-)
Sean
March 19th, 2007 9:35 am
I have 10 categories. Hopefully it’s not too much :S, I don’t think it is.
Corie
March 19th, 2007 9:35 am
I have nine, currently 7 of which have been used. Talking about specific entertainment medias I tried to divide it all into what I was covering with the occasional information or please make it stop posts.
jhay
March 19th, 2007 9:39 am
So far I have 35 categories and I foresee them to increase in the next two months. I create new categories as the need arise but since I fear of having too many categories I use the tagging system instead.
Ken Y-N
March 19th, 2007 9:53 am
I have about 20 categories, but occassionally feel I should add some more, but then I wonder what is the difference between a category and a tag, and if anyone really looks at my categories and/or tags! Looking at my stats, my top category has just 2% of the hits of my top page, and my top tag barely 1%.
I think tags are a bigger issue - my pet hate is when I see a closing line like:
If you want the SEO from tags, please hide them from the main post!
Jason Spence
March 19th, 2007 10:00 am
I currently have 8, but I forsee it getting up to about 15. Any more than that and I think the blog loses focus.
Sharon
March 19th, 2007 10:05 am
I’ve got 24 categories on my Writing Lab blog, but on my Blogger blog, I tag at will, so I must have double that (I have got more than 150 posts on the blog, though). Now I’m trying to be selective about adding new categories, keeping them general and using tags for refinements.
James
March 19th, 2007 10:23 am
I use categories as tags basically so on my Media/Entertainment site I have a ton of categories, and I list them on an archive page so you can search through specific categories.
What’s the difference between using categories as tags or just using tags? Especially if you want to list the tags for people to search?
StormVideographer
March 19th, 2007 10:24 am
I currently have 20 categories, and I feel they work just fine.
Joshua Minton
March 19th, 2007 10:24 am
I’ve had as many as 40 but I often weed them out as I do old posts that were crap. I’ve transferred hosting services three times now and each time, I make it a point to weed out all the undesirable stuff in my archives–you know, put the old fat blog on a diet. Of course, the goal should be the perfect number of categories and the perfect writing every time. We can’t all be home run hitters like you every time, Darren.
blogjunkie
March 19th, 2007 10:43 am
I recently redesigned my blog myMacBUZZ and pruned the categories down into 7 sections. I’m lifting a page from newspapers and using sections like formats, e.g. Articles, Site News, Features. I then tag each post with tags describing its content. This way, tags handle the more granular categorisation and work more like metadata.
Example, for a rumour about iPods, I would do the following:
1. Since its a general article and not a screencast or feature, it goes into the Articles section
2. I then tag it with tags describing the article content - ipod nano, rumour
That way I don’t need separate categories for iPod Video, iPod Shuffle, iPod nano, rumours
Victor
March 19th, 2007 10:58 am
Currently 120 and growing…each category is a separate city/place.
Jermayn Parker
March 19th, 2007 11:09 am
I think from between 6 to 15 is a good amount. I depends on the range on what you post about but I think 60 is too much, way to much..
My blog is fairly wide range (web design, Phantom comics, sport, Christianity and general) and these have sub categories which equals about 12 or so. If I really wanted too, I could probably make that out to be 20 odd but thats too much.
I think its ok not to be too specific and strict in your categories…
Razeen
March 19th, 2007 11:12 am
I just have 5 categories.
I don’t want to confuse my visitors with many categories. I use simple categories with tag in every post, so, the visitors not only get post with categories but also tags.
Andika Kusuma
March 19th, 2007 11:21 am
Currently I have 21 Categories and one of the category is “Other Stuff”, I make this so I didn’t make another Categories and planning to use tags as well for my blog to reduce the Categories
Sarahd
March 19th, 2007 11:40 am
I currenly do not have any categoried. I use tags but I would like to start making categories.
Kuswanto
March 19th, 2007 11:40 am
My company blog don’t use Categories, i am using Tags instead.
My other blog use categories act like tags, and the other blogs is having 12 category on each language, the blog is using 2 language at the moment.
I think too many narrow categories will make the blogs too sophisticated.
Lucas
March 19th, 2007 11:43 am
11. First I try to put the post in a category that already exists. If I can´t, just create a new one.
UFC Daily
March 19th, 2007 11:52 am
I am at 157 right now and will probably be over 300 eventually. This number was reached in about 2 weeks of blogging. I have a category for each UFC fighter as well as more broad topics like UFC news, etc…
Lulu
March 19th, 2007 12:09 pm
I have 13 categories and I am still looking at trimming that down because I think that is too many.
macgoo
March 19th, 2007 12:17 pm
I currently have 13 major topics which all topics are at least related to one of. I had many minor topics (30 plus) before and I felt my site was a bit of a mess and needed some organisation. Hence I introduced 2 groups of major topics which are linked near the top of my page. I have seen my pages viewed per visit actually go up while visitors can actually find what they are looking for with less clicks so I am happy I implemented it. As time goes on I will need to refine my major topics to try and keep the number below 20.
abixalmon
March 19th, 2007 12:35 pm
I have used not more than 15 categories, if i need more i tag them using autometa (Wordpress plugin).
Elber
March 19th, 2007 12:39 pm
I have 26 categories, but I’m trying to cut that by half at least. I use tags though, so that might bring up my total to over a hundred.
Warren Buffett
March 19th, 2007 12:46 pm
It’s not the quantity of categories that’s important but the quality of the category content.
Jeremy
March 19th, 2007 1:04 pm
13 categories. Most of my post fall under 4 of them. The rest are needed but not often used, ie. Site News, etc.
I think you can definitely have too many. Overwhelming readers with topics is a good way to get them to go somewhere else. Trying to cover too much content will cause your posts to be lackluster in my opinion. I think that concentrating on 3 or 4 things you do or know very well produces the highest quality product.
Aaress
March 19th, 2007 1:16 pm
129
I’ve owned On the Baseline for almost two years and that’s two years worth of tennis tournaments sub-categorized by the year. Plus, that also includes quite a few players.
EelKat
March 19th, 2007 1:23 pm
[quote]engtech Says:
March 19th, 2007 at 6:56 am
700.
Because wordpress doesn’t get the difference between categories/tags right. :)
Realistically it’s around 20
[/quote]
I too, use WordPress, I love them, but yeah, they don’t know the differance between catagories and tags, so “officialy” my blog says that I have 428 categories!!!
Actually I have 5 : Writing, Life, Movies, Animals, Sci-Fi; but WordPress doesn’t let me edit the widget so it says that :(
~EK
Cat Laine
March 19th, 2007 1:40 pm
16. I didn’t add them all at the same time, so some this aren’t categorized correctly. Schmoo. Some day, I will go back and sort that out.
Dustin
March 19th, 2007 2:25 pm
11 currently, but I am sure I will be adding at least one more next month and even more as needed in the future.
Eliena Andrews
March 19th, 2007 3:23 pm
Hii,
My blog has 10 categories, Is it fruitful or disadvantage for my blog ?
Thanks
Best Regards,
Eliena Andrews
Robert
March 19th, 2007 4:02 pm
I try to keep my category list to 4-6 across my 3 blogs. I’ve seen some blogs that have way too many and I the first impression I get is that they have way too many topics and the blog isn’t focused. When I have to occasional off-topic post, I’ll put it in a ‘misc’ category just so I don’t have a category for every single post I make.
HART (1-800-HART)
March 19th, 2007 6:03 pm
I’m a big fan of categories, and the more is the merrier. However, in one of my blogs (PetLvr) I did go too far and have MULTIPLE categories for every post. While I think it is okay to have a gabillion different categories - if the content warrants it - I’ve figured back in summer 2006 that it really is annoying to see 2-10 categories for every post (I use at least 2 maybe 3 at most). As a reader, when I see other people’s blogs that have 2-50 categories for the same post and I want to surf the sidebar’s categories and keep seeing the same posts over and over and well .. I tend to just surf elsewhere.
But I had over 1000 posts when it started to annoy me and what do I do? Change the previous 1000 posts? I decided at that time to continue as is - and now, it’s almost 2400 posts and I still haven’t fixed it. But there is a good lining to this issue, since I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.1 - the categories don’t work anymore and part of the blogroll, so the Tag Cloud is much more effective and visually with the UTW plugin - well, I hope people can find stuff on my sites and I can find stuff on other people’s sites who use the cloud as well.
dandellion
March 19th, 2007 6:11 pm
six categories. maybe I need one more, but I’m still not clear about it.
categories gives me kind of navigation from sidebar and are tailored to give specific sound to the overall site. Parallel with them I do tagging, and number of tags is unlimited… they go just naturally, sorting themselves and connect posts…..
Pawel Brodzinski
March 19th, 2007 7:28 pm
I have 12, but until I counted them I thought I was well under 10. I think there’s a reason you should keep number of categories low - it’s quite common that one is checking the whole category and she should find there more than a couple of posts if you want her to stick to your blog.
Michele
March 19th, 2007 8:01 pm
My main blog, which is the oldest one, has the most categories (about 40 or so). Some of them are no longer active, others probably could be culled.
With newer blogs I try to keep the number down.
Michele
MJ Ray
March 19th, 2007 10:03 pm
5 major categories (RSS feeds and so on) containing a total of 10 to 12 pages. (My blog is page-per-topic rather than page-per-post.)
James
March 19th, 2007 10:28 pm
As few as possible.
However, since the category becomes part of the URL for the post, if the post is important enough or different enough from other categories, I will add a category for SEO.
I will also use subcategories for the same reason.
John
March 19th, 2007 11:00 pm
My blog has 47 categories. That is high, but my categories double as Technorati tags, so I try to keep them as specific as possible. I also think that specific tags make it easier for readers to find the information they are looking for. Fewer categories might make for a cleaner sidebar, but they are not good for information retrieval.
Deb/NJ
March 19th, 2007 11:35 pm
Two of my blogs are archived without categories, and when I added categories to them, it became overwhelming how many there could have been. I decided that all my blogs (blogger and wp) would have between 5-10 categories….rather than spreading them all out, i’m grouping them into basic groups.
Ashish Mohta
March 19th, 2007 11:36 pm
I have around 30 with only 160 posts.The only reason is you have to think fo future.You cant just stick to one category and keep filling it till you have enough post.You need to keep growing and fit to specific category to make it richer.Sometimes you might like to drop some and move some to other.It depends how you look into long term
Malin
March 19th, 2007 11:57 pm
I only have 7 categories. I actually cleaned them up yesterday from about 12 or so. It’s cluttering my sidebar ;P There is always a search function to use if you want to digg deeper than the main categories…
Rhea
March 20th, 2007 12:09 am
I definitely think ‘less is more’ when it comes to categories. You have to have a few broad ones and leave it at that.
Mike Panic
March 20th, 2007 12:26 am
My main blog’s name is Randomn3ss.com, it covers a lot of topics and there are several people that are writing for it in addition to myself. Everyone covers different topics, so currently there are 70 categories listed. Most articles published end up in at least two, some as many as 6 categories.
Dave
March 20th, 2007 12:31 am
I have 9 categories setup on mine, but all of them are activated yet. I believe that too many categories takes away from a site.
LintCollector
March 20th, 2007 12:50 am
13 on mine, but I think that’s okay for the type of blog - a personal musings blog where I’m still working out what I want to write about, and where the categories are related to what the rest of the website is about (the blog is only a part of it).
Even on a personal site with “diversity” as a theme, I think there is merit in not appearing too unfocused, so hopefully I won’t go much over 13.
reptile
March 20th, 2007 1:12 am
14 categories… I believe it’s a good number .
Raghu
March 20th, 2007 1:50 am
That a clear and basic post - but good one to start off.
After reading Darren’s blog, I just made a posting on the 3 steps to get resolved before posting on your blog - Go here for reading that post
http://www.raghucs.com/2007/03/19/3-steps-before-you-make-a-blog-posting/
Sugar Mouse In The Rain
March 20th, 2007 1:51 am
I have 9, but that’s very relative. If it’s a personal blog and you can write on 100 different topics, then why not?
Jim Duncan
March 20th, 2007 2:01 am
About 40; when I started just over two years ago, I thought I needed a category for everything - as it turns out, only about 20 categories have more than 50 posts, and only about 10 have more than 100 posts.
Seo Practices for Beginners
March 20th, 2007 2:54 am
I think categories should be defined according to your site structure. You can include a post in a couple different categories to get the chance to have more exposure but only if it is really related to the topic.
Mephala
March 20th, 2007 3:26 am
I keep mine to 4: parenting, finance and investments, technology and the Internet, and life and health.
ilker
March 20th, 2007 3:34 am
Like David Wilkinson, I have 18 categories as well.. funny, I too had to go check before writing here. So little we know about our own blogs =)
Matt Wardman
March 20th, 2007 4:26 am
For a personal/political blog I am happy with maybe 20-25, or a few more if they are hierarchical.
Far more tags, though.
Matt
DanielthePoet
March 20th, 2007 5:02 am
I have been wondering about this exact same issue for the past two weeks. I know that selecting the names of your categories is important for SEO, but I also see some of the most successful blogs only have a few broad categories.
I’m inclined to believe that if you have a highly specialized blog, where the focus is on a sub category of a sub category, you will probably only need 5 to 10 categories. My blog, CultureFeast, is the opposite. I write about everything under the sun.
My solution is to try to keep main categories down to 20 at the most and add precise subcategories as I go. I don’t add a subcategory for every new blog, but I ask myself, “Am I likely to write about this topic enough to make it a subcategory?” That tells me whether the main category will work.
When dealing with subcategories, the only other issue you face is presentation. I’m currently using the Cutline theme for WordPress because I’m a writer, not a designer. The theme allows for a unique page called “Archives”, which is simply a page with links to each month of posts and also links to each category and subcategory. The downside is that the presentation is lacking. In bulleted format, the subcategories make the page look sloppy. As I get around to it, I will toy with the design and try to find a way to make the presentation of categories and subcategories more appealing.
Andrew
March 20th, 2007 7:41 am
I just deleted about 40 categories added on an ad-hoc basis over the past few years. I have come to the conclusion that categories are practically useless so will be following a different methodology shortly.
David Villarreal
March 20th, 2007 7:46 am
i have hundreds of categories
i use it like tags, and i limit the tags that Wordpress show in sidebar
Jacob Share
March 20th, 2007 8:49 am
10. I didn’t want the list to get out of hand, so I kept the names general enough that I should always be covered. Ask me how many tags…that’s a whole different story :)
Rob O.
March 20th, 2007 9:19 am
I was anxiously awaiting the Blogger labels and have nearly 30 labels on 2Dolphins now. And sure enough, when I began adding labels, I searched (in vain) all over to try to find some kind of guide. I ended up just winging it.
I was mostly interested in having these for the sake of navigation and/or categorization because our posts are scattered across a diverse range of topics.
I wonder what, if any, role the Blogger labels play in the SEO value of our pages… Do these make any difference at all with regards to how Google et al view our site?
LamaZone
March 20th, 2007 9:36 am
about 60 actually, but, as mentioned above, that is due to the fact that this version of WP does not allow me to use tags.
it works for me.
jamjammo
March 20th, 2007 9:52 am
I have 6 main categories with no more than 15 subs.
I run a magazine styled site.
i8pikachu
March 20th, 2007 5:04 pm
I use categories sort of like tags. Amazon uses them too but calls them “nodes”. The key is not to look at categories as a way to list everything but as a system to help organize your content on a larger level. You don’t have to actually display a link to every category but often you’ll find that it comes in handy when you want to direct someone to all your articles related to “Madagascar primates”.
Peter Andersen
March 21st, 2007 1:05 am
I actually give this a lot of thought before posting.
At the moment I have 7 categories. I really do prefer to keep the number low, but who knows, the number will most likely grow slightly. Must say though, as others have said : “Less is more.”
Regards
Volkan Özçelik
March 21st, 2007 3:10 am
Well I have **cough** 47 categories.
The question “but why so many?” has an interesting reason.
I will try to explain if you bear with me.
I have a social tagging start-up and I try to use tags more than usual in order to get some inspiration and understanding on the mental process of tagging. I have read dozens of articles on folksonomy and taxonomy but I believe you cannot truely grasp a concept until you learn to live with it.
So I begin to live inside a tag-based world. I tag my scribbles, I tag notes that I jot down to a sheet of paper, I tag my calendar events,
I even use a tag-based file system instead of using folders like everyone else.
And I massively tag my blog entries.
When I write a blog post. I attach as much tags (categories) to it as I can without even thinking a similar tag (category) exists.
This results in several major categories (tags) with more than 10 posts and minor categories with one or two posts.
Currently my blog is in a state between chaos and order — getting closer to an “ordered” state at each blog post I write.
(or to rephrase my blog seems chaotic from outside, but there is an order in that chaos :) )
Best.
Jeffrey Kishner
March 21st, 2007 4:57 am
I write an astrology blog, so I display the twelve categories of all the zodiac signs at the top. This helps readers navigate to the topic they’re interested in. I also tag all posts ‘astrology’ for Technorati.
francesco mapelli
March 22nd, 2007 10:02 am
something like 60.
But I don’t think that my blog is the one you were reading :)
Maybe they’re too much, but I display them as a nice category cloud (I wrote the plugin for wordpress 2.1 by myself…) and I find them nice and usable… should I drop the ones I use less? or should I hide them from my category cloud?
Mary-Ann
March 23rd, 2007 8:26 am
I have a motorsport blog and I just have “news”, “photos”, “videos” because I did have lots of different categories and it just got out of hand. Should I categorise by region? By championship? Type of post? All of the above?
So I ended up deleting them all and using tags (UTW) to define posts more specifically.
Mark Boudreau
March 25th, 2007 4:21 am
I had about 27 originally but in the process of my current redesign of the site I am narrowing it down to 7. I think the less the better. Readers can always use the site search to find something more specific.
I feel a Categroy Cull coming on
March 27th, 2007 10:43 pm
[…] There was a conversation last week on ProBlogger about the appropriate number of categories. The 92 responses gave figures ranging from 6 to more than 100 and explored the rationale for this decision, which was for a blog where posts were categorised by location. […]
Matt Wardman
March 27th, 2007 11:05 pm
I’ve had a more detailed look at categories on my blog.
And now I feel a cull coming on …
Matt
Brian Carnell
March 30th, 2007 6:14 am
At last count, 400 or so on my personal blog. I have another blog that has well over 1,000 categories.
Frucomerci
April 7th, 2007 10:08 am
I have just started my blog but I have already 10!
I think are enough! I don’t want to have more,
Regards
Steupz
September 30th, 2007 4:39 am
nearly 200
Abid
December 11th, 2007 6:01 pm
Could somebody tell me how to put a category on my blog? I use Blogger.com, i am new to blogging, any help appreciated.
Thank you!
moonburst
February 15th, 2008 12:56 pm
At present I have 5, I will be adding another 5 in the upcoming weeks. They are general subjects but will be refined in the upcoming weeks as to what categories articles are supposed to fall under. 60 categories? Wow, maybe that’s a little bit too much.
@ Mr. Abid, I have a tutorial on my blog that shows you how to do just that and is made for new bloggers!
Eren
July 4th, 2008 10:34 am
Hi there,
Well I believe the ideal is to have main categories and you can make several sub-categories under each main one if there is too much content.
When you start out your blog you may not have many sub-categories but as time moves on there may be a need to create subcategories to organize things better.
I would say don’t go over 10 main categories. Even if that means bunching a few of your categories into a more broad one.
Studies have shown that the most categories that one looks at is 7 so going 3 overboard would be my limit.
I do think that the page that the main categories are though should be optimized for the keyword phrase related to it.
Right now i am mapping out my site so i have been trying to bunch the categories together so that things are easier to find.
The advice of not creating an entire category for a topic that has a little amount of content is great:-)
For that we need to think ahead before creating the site or blog-site as to what will we be writing most about.
Many people don’t analyze before they build and then get into a disorganized mess when the site is made.
This is why I have taken quite some time studying and analyzing before i actually build- so I don’t regret my categories- and decisions later on.
Blessings,
Eren
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