The weekend arrives, and with it a basic post on WordPress concepts. And what can be more basic than categories and tags? Well that.
Categories in WordPress
Categories are a way of organizing posts (tickets, articles) of your WordPress. Be careful, because when we say “Categories” like that, without further ado, forever We are referring to the categories of the posts. And in fact, if you don’t install any plugins, they are the only ones there are. We should not confuse them with other types of categories, such as the “Product Categories” that can appear when we install WooCommerce, for example, because they have nothing to do with it.
Categories have certain peculiarities. The first is that they are hierarchical. That means that there can be categories INSIDE other categories. For example, if we are a newspaper and one of our categories is “Sports”, a subcategory could be “Football”. Or in the category “International” there could be the subcategory “Germany”.
The categories and subcategories affect the construction of the URL. So, in the case that we mentioned in the example, we could have a URL of the style:
- miwebperiodico.com/category/sports/football
- miwebperiodico.com/category/politics/germany
Notice that the categories and subcategories (in red) indicate dependence on each other. On the other hand, we have what is called the “base category”, which we can see in green in the example. If we do not indicate anything, by default “category” will appear in English. We can change that in “Settings / Permalinks”. If, for example, we put “news” it would look something like this:
- miwebperiodico.com/news/sports/football
- miwebperiodico.com/news/politics/germany
So, it is important that when a distribution of categories and subcategories is chosen, it is not touched, since as you can see, that would change the URLs, something that Mr. Google does not like very much, since it will begin to deindex those that no longer find. And if we have to do it, as long as it is with the corresponding ones.
As I say, categories are basically used to organize blog content, and while there are no rules about how much there should be, they are often few and far between. Let’s put an interval of 5 to 10, more or less. This is so for organizational issues. Let’s imagine a newspaper with 80 sections… It would be a mess, right?
Although in principle an article can be assigned to several categories, it is not highly recommended, and it should be chosen only for the main one, to ensure that we will not have duplicate content problems. That is because it is normally recommended to index and position the categories at the positioning and SEO level.
Tags in WordPress
On the other hand, we have the labels. More dynamic, more anarchic, more rebellious. And above all, more. Many more. Unlike categories, labels are not hierarchical. That means you can’t create a subtag that depends on another. They all have the same level.
Like categories, they also have their own URL, to list all the articles that are tagged with it. In this case, and following the previous simile, it could be something similar to this:
- miwebperiodico.com/label/Leo Messi
- miwebperiodico.com/label/angela merkel
As you can see, in this case there are no sublevels, but we do have the “base tag” that does the same as the base category, that is, add a text before the category.
By default that text is “tag” (label in English). Let’s not leave it like that, which is a shame, and put something more appropriate:
- miwebperiodico.com/theme/Leo Messi
- miwebperiodico.com/theme/angela merkel
Once again, although there is no set rule, the tags are much more numerous than the categories. An article that is categorized in “sports/soccer” does not make sense for it to be in other categories, but it can have many labels “Leo Messi, FC Barcelona, Valencia, league, television…” as you can see, it is a very more atomized of information, which would not make sense to have as categories. That is why we can have hundreds or even thousands of them, depending on our situation. That means hundreds or thousands of URLs with very similar content, and that is why their indexing in search engines is not recommended, that is, not positioning them or doing SEO.
In summary
For those who want to have a quick reference of all this, I have created this table as a summary, I hope you find it useful:
In short, think of categories as if they were large filing folders in which you keep documents, and of labels as if they were those colored post-its that you can place on each document. I hope that helps! You already know that if you want to know more and better about WordPress, you can subscribe to my , in which I talk about this and much more. You already know that if you do, you will be able to access .
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