For quite some time now I’ve been wanting to sit down and clean up the topics (categories) and tags that I use on this website. I’ve not come up with a detailed strategy on when, how and why I would create another topic or tag. However, I’ve made some major headway on reducing the use overall to try and keep things clean and optimized.
Clean Up
Looking over my topics I noticed that I had quite a few that really were duplicates of the main topic I wanted to use, so I eliminated those topics and moved the posts under the topic I wanted. After that I just removed the topics that were barely being used and just outright unnecessary. As I was doing this I kept asking myself do I want this to become content on my website that warranted a topic for it? In a lot of cases my answer was no and that the post could easily be associated to another topic.
Next I tackled the tags, again I found a lot of tags that were just either duplicates or useless to have such as 2k, 4k, adapter, etc. This kind of tags to me are not benefiting anyone. After that I looked for tags that were not necessary to have due to the fact that the tag duplicated what was already written in the title and didn’t need yet another tag.
In the process of cleaning things up I discovered on the pages that listed the topics and tags that the last item would get duplicated. Thankfully it was just a simple logic bug, though it did take about 20 minutes to spot the obvious (smile) mistake.
Making a Plan
In all honesty I really want to make a strategy or guidelines that I would refer upon to determine when a topic or tag is created. Unfortunately at the moment of writing this I’ve oddly not been able to locate decent articles on this subject. The few articles I did find were not that helpful and seemed to imply that one should stick to 5 to 10 topics (categories) total with one per post and tags about 6 maximum per post. No mention of maximum tags, nor was there explanation as to the reason why. Past articles, I’ve read I swear covered this topic. I can vaguely remember even talking about this on Mastodon with people, but I was unable recall them and do not have a bookmark either.
Keeping the benefits of search engine optimization and ease of human discover to me should be important. So, if anyone happens to know of good content that helps with this process in having effective topics and tags please let me know.
Stats
Here are the end results of several hours of work.
| Item Name | Before | After | Removed |
| Paginated pages | 136 | 51 | 85 |
| Topics (categories) | 38 | 16 | 22 |
| Tags | 139 | 29 | 110 |
This is post 58 of 100, and is round 2 of the 100 Days To Offload challenge.
References
- Blog, Wikipedia
- Clean broom buckle, image by LV11, published Dec 9, 2015, Pixabay
- Tag (metadata), Wikipedia
Changelog
-
- change topic
- add tag
-
- change 100DaysToOffload message