I recently read some articles pertaining to WordPress and using tags for search engine optimization. Some articles claim that using tags can cause Google to flag your WordPress blog posts as duplicate content. Google will consider tags similar to blog posts.
If you have same keywords in a blog title as tags this can affect your traffic. I decided to remove all of my tags on my AnetComputers.com website. However, with nearly four hundred thirty posts, this would turn into a nightmare deleting one page of tags at a time.
WordPress by default lists twenty items ie. posts, categories, posts, etc. at a time. This would take way too long to delete just twenty tags at a time when I have over two thousand three hundred tags. I decided to search for a plugin and or mySQL command.
I found a delete WordPress tags or categories without a plugin blog post which stipulated that you could change the number of items WordPress lists at a time, from twenty to any number up to nine hundred ninety nine. I tested this out, and sure enough I was able to delete nine hundred ninety nine tags, on a different website of mine. Talk about a huge time saver.
What you want to do is browse to your tags from your dashboard, by selecting “Tags” under “Posts”. At top right corner click on “Screen Options”. A hidden menu appears.
Look for “Number of items per page:”. Twenty items are selected by default. Change that number to anything up to nine hundred ninety nine and click “Apply”.
Also, I don’t need to login to phpmyadmin and run a database command. I recommend you backup your WordPress mySQL database first just in case you want to restore your tags. Personally, I don’t think my blog readers use tags.
I don’t have a tag cloud plugin installed either. We shall see if this helps my search engine optimization efforts. Hopefully, I see more traffic.
If not, I have cleaned up my database of tags that I don’t necessarily need. Your results on your WordPress website may vary.