The lesson here I learned (thank you) was to keep the categories of the consumer reviews/blogs to a minimum. Is there any place with a specific category list that would be used for general consumer reviews/blogs… thanks.

Why do we need tags and categories in the first place? It’s just more iterations of the same content, and if tags are displayed in a usable manner, why not eliminate all categories on the basis of redundancy?

I just published a post about my category cleaning experience and the insights that I’ve gained from it. I posted a screenshot of my categories before and you can now see what my categories are now.

I’d like to get some feedback on my current categories. I’m really wanting to turn my blog into a more valuable resource on the web. Please visit if you have a minute.

Serge, don’t be afraid to upgrade. Read the suggestions for preparing to upgrade and it should be okay – check the plugin list for known incompatibilities. If you can, put all the relevant files into a different folder on your server and check it’s working and then change the folder name rather than doing what I did.

It seems to me that tags might be similar to keywords, but it also seems obvious that keywords are different to categories. So this post saying categories and tags should be used differently still holds.

How are keywords used? Do they have anything to do with blogging – I’ve never seen reference to them before, unless perhaps you’re talking about search engines. I think this post is referring more to usability than SEO.

What do you want tags to do?

How are they different from keywords?

Until that distinction is made clear, tagging will never amount to much.

And no, I don’t think that Clay Shirky’s original article on this distinction amounted to very much.

I’ll remember you the next time I’m thinking about tagging and such! ;)

Dave – Your call. We all have our own styles I suppose.

Josiah – Glad you enjoyed it. :)

Candida – It’s definitely a possibility. The different search engines do things differently, and we never know exactly how they work, but it would seem likely that this could cause trouble (Particularly if you show full posts).

kuba – So the two categories are both parts of two separate feeds? In that example, then I can understand it. (What if someone is interested in all of your content though, and subscribes to both feeds? Are they going to get the same article twice? Or do you offer a “complete” feed option as well?). Thanks for getting back to me btw, very good example. :)

I write about travels and adventure racing (2 categories, 2 feeds, 2 slightly different types of readers). But in some particular posts about adventure racing (sport) there are also descriptions of beautiful places in the world and less about sport. I want to keep it in ar category for my sport readers, but I also want to put it in category subscribed by travellers…

Is it a good example?

I’ve heard before that if you use more than one category for a post then search engines will see both categories as duplicate content.

This may be wrong, but it made me stick to one category per post.