Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can I safely delete unused tags??
-
Can I safely delete unused tags, ones with 0 posts connected to them?
Thanks,
- Mike
-
Hi Mike,
I wouldnt worry too much about this.
Having old pages or removed pages returning 404s is completely fine by Google. Eventually, they will drop those pages from the index.
If you are worried about those pages and/or they are being shown in SERPs and want to remove those urls faster you can use the URL removal tool from Search Console. Sadly, you have to manually submit each url and you cannot do it in bulk.Hope ir help,
Best luck.
Gaston -
Thanks for the reply! But now it seems that pages for those tags still exist, just with no content in them.
Update: Now the empty page is simply showing as a 404 "Uh-Oh...Page not found!"
Hrmm. Where do I go from here? Create 410's? I didn't know any more steps needed to be taken when deleting tag pages with 0 content connected to those tags.
- Mike
-
Hi Mike,
As long as you are referring to Wordpress, yes it's safe to remove tags that have no content nor are being used.
Best of luck.
Gaston
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can a H1 Tag Have Multiple Spans Within It?
H1 tags on my client's website follow the template [Service] + [Location]. These two have their own span, meaning there are two spans in an H1 tag. class="what">Truck Repair near class="where">California, CA How do crawl bots see this? Is that okay for SEO?
Technical SEO | | kevinpark1910 -
How do you delete an admin user in wordpress that wont delete
I hired an indian company to do some work on three sites that I own. I used a freelancing platform and they have been banned and now when i check in my wordpress sites, the admin user will not delete. Everytime i try and delete them it comes back. I change the password and the email address, but when i check a couple of hours later it comes back again, giving them full control over my sites which they are playing around with. any help would be great. I have tried going into the cpanel but it still will not delete. my hosting company has tried to delete them but it is not working
Technical SEO | | in2townpublicrelations0 -
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Why is Google replacing our title tags with URLs in SERP?
Hey guys, We've noticed that Google is replacing a lot of our title tags with URLs in SERP. As far as we know, this has been happening for the last month or so and we can't seem to figure out why. I've attached a screenshot for your reference. What we know: depending on the search query, the title tag may or may not be replaced. this doesn't seem to have any connection to the relevance of the title tag vs the url. results are persistent on desktop and mobile. the length of the title tag doesn't seem to correlate with the replacement. the replacement is happening at mass, to dozens of pages. Any ideas as to why this may be happening? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | Mobify
Peter mobify-site-www.mobify.com---Google-Search.png0 -
Can a CMS affect SEO?
As the title really, I run www.specialistpaintsonline.co.uk and 6 months ago when I first got it it had bad links which google had put a penalty against it so losts it value. However the penalty was lift in Sept, the site corresponds to all guidelines and seo work has been done and constantly monitored. the issue I have is sales and visits have not gone up, we are failing fast and running on 2 or 3 sales a month isn't enough to cover any sort of cost let alone wages. hence my question can the cms have anything to do with it? Im at a loss and go grey any help or advice would be great. thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google. Sad times. I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months. All 5000 of them! Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam. About 2800 of them were junk. As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content. As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed. There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites. And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to! As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them. I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines." As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done? Cheers Steve
Technical SEO | | SteveBrumpton0 -
What happens when you put an image in an H1 tag?
I am currently updating some H1 tags for my site but the tags are generated automatically by the text that is entered into a field on our content manager software. However because we need an image in this area as well, the entire field including the code for the image is surrounded by an H1 tag. Is this bad for SEO?
Technical SEO | | eVacStore0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1
