The difference between categories and tags.

Posted by Wonder

November 16, 2008

I was wondering if I should redo my category list before I got too many posts to move or whatever. That research got a little interesting.

For most blogs, without some fancy footwork, categories are the structure of the blog if not the whole site. In most templates, your categories will make up a clickable list of links somewhere on your pages. It probably will be in your sidebar. In the old days of web design, I think we called that a sub-menu.

For WordPress, that category list ends up being an important menu. If you write on a lot of topics, it can be the primary way peope will find your stuff. Obviously, you might consider your category names carefully.

In WordPress, you do have control over how many of your categories display in the listing on your pages. However, this would conceivably make them invisible. I can’t see that there would be anything to be gained by not making your posts readable on your blog.

Common sense says I don’t want a long list of categories. I don’t want people have to read an extra page to find all those posts I wrote about vestal virgins ;)

I also read somewhere while I was researching categories that you shouldn’t include your posts in more than one category as it would result in “duplicate pages”. Of course, that would be a bad thing because it upsets the search engines.

I’m going to have to research that further though as it doesn’t really make sense to me. If each of these posts is snippet of text in a database, how could linking to that data result in duplicate pages? Even if it were multiple links it would still only be one little chunk of text right?

Sheesh, correct me if I’m wrong here, will ya? Maybe I still don’t get it.

WordPress says tags are free form words that you put in a comma separated list under your post.

So basically they’re keywords like you should have in the header text of your posts but it’s no doubt easier putting them on the page? O.K., I’m in.

WordPress

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