WWMD: Delete Some Categories
- Filed under: WWMD
For this weekend, narrow down the number of categories that you use on your blog, unless it’s a general blog that covers a wide range of topics.
How does deleting categories benefit you? Plain and simple, your blog needs to stick to its niche, focused on its main topic(s), so your list of categories need to reflect that. A short list of categories makes it easier for wandering visitors to determine what your blog is about, just like the title, blog description, main navigation links, and etc.
Regardless of what it’s about, your blog needs to look the part, say the part, and most importantly be the part. Every little thing reinforces the fact that your blog is bout a certain niche. The more you make it clear that your blog is about a certain niche, the more likely visitors will come back for it.
While narrowing down my own set of categories, it was clear to me that I was wandering away from what my blog is about, WordPress themes. Instead of ignoring miscellaneous categories with few posts that didn’t have much to do with WordPress or WordPress themes, I moved the posts under those categories to the Uncategorized category and deleted the now empty miscellaneous categories.
Another benefit from shortening your category list is spotting your strengths. For some blogs, it’s easy to see what their strengths are. For example, you can clearly tell that Wpdesigner’s strengths are WordPress Themes and Tutorials. For some other blogs, it isn’t so easy to determine. Deleting miscellaneous categories will help you determine your strengths.
So, go through your blog to determine whether you need to re-focus and get back on track. If you can, delete miscellaneous categories.
Have a great weekend!
Just popping in ot say I recently cleaned up al lthe sidebar crap I had, mostly the link-exchange type of things there are. And there are plenty, as I’m sure you know. I had to put some in the footer just to make room.
Funnily enough, after I did that, my traffic went *up*.
samll lemon completely agree with small patato :p
so many typo errors.. -__-||
Hmmm… Actually I have more then 1500 categories… too much?
Yea, too much
Great Advice from Wpdesigner.com
I have been keeping track of WPDesigner.com for some time now. The first thing that got my attention was the high quality themes that Small Potato produces. In fact, this blog uses one of his themes, Pride. Recently, Small Potato started a series o…
[…] of posts. Small Potato of WPDesigner.com actually talked about this issue just the other day: trimming down your WordPress Categories to be more powerful. Take a look through your categories and see which ones have only a couple of posts in; group it […]
But won’t it affect my search engine crawls? I am planning to clean up my blog and this would include deleting some categories.
Your category page can potentially hurt your blog because it basically display the same content as the front page (in some cases). That counts as duplicate content.
I really want to do this. I have over 50 categories. But I am worried about losing traffic. I mean, you’re basically deleting pages that have been indexed.
And it will take time for them to be reindexed again. Did you lose a significant amount of traffic when you recategorized all your blog entries? It’s a bit like starting all over again… after all that hard work and time.
And I’m also afraid, if anyone has stolen my work… that I will get penalized once the content is reindexed in a new category.
I’m sure I lost some traffic. On the other hand, I’m sure it was minimal. Most of the traffic comes through the front page.
If you’re worried about losing traffic, do some 301 redirects for the deleted pages.
Do tags also make duplicate content?
Probably…
If I’m not mistaken, they work the same way categories do. Don’t worry so much about search engine rankings. Do what you need to do and then put together a good robot.txt file.
So having never done anything with robot text file I have been Googling before asking. but is a robot in meta the way to go in my index php?
something like that?
sorry not index but archives I meant to say
Sorry for my multiple post SP I’ll work on this on my own as I know you have more important things than helping with my silly questions.
As always you and your site are always a great help.