Tags vs Categories

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[Kin]

What's the difference? Are tags more to do with SEO? Oooh don't I sound like I know what I'm talking about? 

[ChristineParfitt]

Hi Kin,

Lorrelle on Wordpress has some good resources on tags versus categories.

[Lightening]

I'm not sure I'm any the wiser after reading that article.  She likens tags to an index page.  So does that mean I should be using more tags and less categories?   

[Nomesque]

Lightening - my analogy would be more like "categories are chapters, tags are the index at the back". So if my blog were a cookbook, my categories might be:

Main Dishes
Side Dishes
Entrees
Desserts
Drinks
Nibbles

and my tags might be:

pumpkin
potato
cheap
gluten-free
chocolate
(etc)

Does that help at all?

[ChristineParfitt]

Categories to organise and help people see what you write about and tags as keywords so that people can find more specific stuff.

Ok that was a totally inadequate answer

I'm thinking that Andrew will have a much better one

[ChristineParfitt]

or Nomesque will have a good answer 

[Gemisht]

Does that help at all?

That's great, thanks. Cause I had been wondering too, and so glad that Kin asked 

[Meg]

Kin,

I think that's one way of looking at it. Categories are for people, Tags for searching. Say I had a category for "Search Engines" where I put all my articles discussing search engines, I might tag a post with Google or Yahoo! for instance. So the broad subject is "search engines", the specific "google".

Another category - "Feed readers" and within that posts tagged with "Google Reader", "bloglines" etc. I liken "tags" to "keywords".

I have WAY too many categories on my blog and use them a bit like tags I suppose (too the point where I renamed my category cloud to "Tags").

[Meg]

Wow - you guys are quick! Nomesque has a good example 

[Kin]

Thanks for all the awesome responses. 

I'll get the hang of this blogging thing yet 

[guera]

I have WAY too many categories on my blog and use them a bit like tags I suppose (too the point where I renamed my category cloud to "Tags").

I'm the same - I really need to consolidate my categories and start using tags. Otherwise the categories are too cumbersome.

[Lightening]

Lightening - my analogy would be more like "categories are chapters, tags are the index at the back". So if my blog were a cookbook, my categories might be:

Main Dishes
Side Dishes
Entrees
Desserts
Drinks
Nibbles

and my tags might be:

pumpkin
potato
cheap
gluten-free
chocolate
(etc)

Does that help at all?

That is brilliant!!!  Thank you!!!!   

Now I have a big mess to sort out because I have waaaaayyyyy too many categories and have only just started using tags.   

[FormerAdmin]

Hi,

think of categories as buckets that you pour posts into, and tags as the species names of the microbes that live in those buckets. They are totally mix'n'matchable - the microbes can live in several buckets. As most self-hosted WordPress blogs are single-user, and there is an Administrator-level person doing the posting, you can most likely add categories and tags at any time. This means that tags and categories are in effect the same informationally (in other words, structured entirely the way that each user sees fit), except that the presentation mechanism is slightly different. WordPress allows navigation by category out of the box, so there is a blogname.com/category/category-name directory.

Don't get me started on how "faux Web 2.0 hey mum look at me tagging how cool am I" this is - I'm probably one of a hundred people on the planet that actually cares about how this stuff affects the dream of the semantic web and I'll only bore you

You can have (in effect) any number of categories and tags. When a post is put into multiple categories, because of the ../category/category-name directory structure, it shows up on indexing services like Google as a duplicate post.

What is useful is to consider your readers - will they find what they are looking for by use of any navigation mechanism on your blog? When all is said and done, this is what really matters. Do you apply the categories consistently? If you are using a magazine theme like Mimbo that displays the latest post in a number of categories, do you have enough categories to make this worthwhile? Or do you have too many?

And if you have too many categories, does this mean that you haven't defined your blog's niche in sufficient detail? Or does it mean that you're categorising when you should have been tagging? My rule of thumb is to look at the number of posts in a given category - if there is only 1 post in a category on a blog with 100 posts, then that category can probably be replaced by a tag (so that it doesn't get in the way of category-level browsing by being an orphan out there by itself). 

Best regards, Andrew

[Lani]

I'm not sure I'm any the wiser after reading that article.  She likens tags to an index page.  So does that mean I should be using more tags and less categories?   

IMO, yes.   Also IMO, all posts should only be listed in ONE category.  There is nothing more annoying than looking through a blog and finding the same content in different archives.  It also can create duplicate content for your site (depending on your settings) which is bad for search engines.

Having said that, however, the newish in-built tagging system in WordPress is absolutely shite compared to what the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin used to do.  (Perhaps this has been fixed in the latest release?)

[Nomesque]

IMO, yes.   Also IMO, all posts should only be listed in ONE category.  There is nothing more annoying than looking through a blog and finding the same content in different archives.  It also can create duplicate content for your site (depending on your settings) which is bad for search engines.

What do others think of this?

I must admit I don't tend to stick to this rule. eg. on my BB site, I have Food and Coffee categories - and sometimes a post will go in both categories.

[SnakyPoet]

Hmmm, on Blogger there are only labels, which may be regarded as either Categories or Tags. I started off using them as tags, then noticed how they were proliferating in my sidebar, and went through and created categories instead ... except in some cases I left the tags there too because they seemed useful. In practice there is no difference, you understand - but if I think in terms of categories, I hope I'll create fewer. So long as I can find posts I want later! The convenience to myself might outweigh potential benefits to readers, whom I can't second-guess anyhow.

I love the chapters and index analogy! If only I could use them that way.

And I like what Lani does in her blogs (which is what first made me think I was getting far too many labels, by invidious comparison).

Which brings me to my next question, about how to arrange my blog/s. But I'll make a new post on that one.

[SnakyPoet]

Oops, sorry, probably wasn't supposed to be here anyway, being as I just noticed it's Wordpress (which does make sense, lol). One minute I was at the general blogging, I thought ....

*Slinks away quietly.*

[Snoskred]

Hey, your post was relevant. Nobody is going to dead you for posting in a Wordpress thread even though you use a Blogger blog.

However, that does bring to my attention the fact that the topic is something relevant to all blogs. I'm moving it to blogging in general.

[Kin]

Hmm, I often post things in multiple categories. Like if I do a post about keeping kids entertained on holidays, I'll put it in "holidays" and "keeping the kids amused".

If I do a post about fitting study into my schedule, I'll post it under "study" and "organisation". I don't often post it to more than 2 categories, but a lot of my posts do overlap.

I can see me using tags though...

[Meg]

IMO, yes.   Also IMO, all posts should only be listed in ONE category.  There is nothing more annoying than looking through a blog and finding the same content in different archives.  It also can create duplicate content for your site (depending on your settings) which is bad for search engines.

What do others think of this?

I must admit I don't tend to stick to this rule. eg. on my BB site, I have Food and Coffee categories - and sometimes a post will go in both categories.

Yes, I use multiple categories often. In my defence I have

Code:

Disallow: /category/

in my robots.txt which should solve any duplicate content issues.

[SnakyPoet]

Thanks, Snoskred, for the reassurance!

I came up with the idea of putting the labels I regard as categories in all caps, to distinguish them from those functioning as tags. And gave the list a heading: "CATEGORIES / Tags" in the hope it'll cue readers in. I used some of the MySpace blog categories because they're quite serviceable for the most part, plus some others I've always wished they had, such as "HEALTH AND HEALING." I think that's as good as I can get it on Blogger.

Bearing in mind Lani's advice, I have been a very good girl and only assigned one category per post - but it was hard sometimes. Still, it's a really interesting exercise to choose; gets you to see where the essential focus is.

[Sueblimely]

I came up with the idea of putting the labels I regard as categories in all caps, to distinguish them from those functioning as tags. And gave the list a heading: "CATEGORIES / Tags" in the hope it'll cue readers in.

You could go one step further and copy the link locations to your CATEGORY labels and put them in a separate link list named Categories and rename your current Category? Each post would then have to have two labels - one for the category and one for the label. Now I have thought of this I may do a post on the subject   

[FormerAdmin]

Blatant plug: I thought about this thread and put my two cents worth together as Categorisation 101 for Bloggers

Cheers, Andrew

[supersarah]

Just adding I am loving the discussion in this post, always good to get an overview of something which people use in a variety of ways. For example I tend to read archives chronologically rather than dip in with tags or categories when I find a blog I like, but thats just me.

I started adding blogger labels to posts ages ago but encountered the same problem...

Hmmm, on Blogger there are only labels, which may be regarded as either Categories or Tags. I started off using them as tags, then noticed how they were proliferating in my sidebar

so I stopped. Now I am thinking I might need to borrow your idea SnakyPoet and try and categorise my posts or at least continue using some labels, as much for my own benefit as anyone else's. I hate knowing I have blogged about something and then not being able to find it, happens far too often!

[SnakyPoet]

Hi supersarah

I am planning to follow Sueblimely's suggestion and take it that step further. Dear Sublimely, thanks for the suggestion, and I do hope you do a post on it!