301 Redirect All WordPress Tags to Home

I guess you are using Google Webmaster Tools and looking at duplicate content issues.

“Search Appearance” >> “HTML Improvements” >> “Duplicate title tags”

In a perfect SEO world you wouldn’t have any duplicate title tags, but the larger a site gets, more likely you’ll have duplicates.

 

I never use tags see Why Creating Lots of Categories and Tags is Anti-SEO.

If you delete all your tags a simple 301 redirect assuming you didn’t change your tags base on the WordPress permalinks page is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]

That would 301 redirect all tags (everything indexed under example.com/tag/ (all tags have the /tag/ slug by default) to the home page of example.com

 

If you have changed the tag base on the permalinks page change tag to what you use.

If you’ve been using the monthly archive widget another good 301 redirect rule is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^2013/(.*)$ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^2014/(.*)$ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]

 

This would 301 redirect 2013 and 2014 dated archives to home. Dated archives have no SEO value, waste link benefit, so if you delete the monthly archive widget and/or the calendar widget add the above. Go back as far as your site’s existed, one line for each year.

 

Always check you haven’t got anything important indexed under a domain with a site search

site:https://stallion-theme.co.uk/2014/

and

site:https://stallion-theme.co.uk/tag/

This one shows my categories:

site:https://stallion-theme.co.uk/responsive/

Under “Settings” >> “Permalinks” I’ve changed my Category base to “responsive”.

I wouldn’t want to use a 301 redirect rule which included “RewriteRule ^responsive/(.*)$ ….” since it would 301 redirect all my indexed categories which I want spidered and indexed!

Also check with Google Webmaster Tools and/or Google Analytics none of your tags generate search engine traffic. If you find a few are pulling in traffic either keep those tags or 301 redirect them to the most relevant webpage on the site (similar SERPs).

 

If you had a tag called “Awesome” that had SERPs and a category called “Awesome Stuff” a possible solution would be delete all the tags and use this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^tag/awesome/(.*)$ http://example.com/category/awesome-stuff/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]

This would 301 redirect the Awesome tag to the Awesome Stuff category conserving SEO benefit. All other tags 301 to home.

This way you can conserve any ranking value from tags that have SERPs and redirect the rest to home.

In my experience tags tend not to generate traffic, especially single word tags. I’ve bought dozens of WordPress blogs with loads of tags I’ve deleted and never had to use the above code to conserve traffic. Though being a perfectionist I setup those types of 301 redirects anyway, I look for the most relevant webpage for something I’ve deleted because I can :-)

David

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