Can I choose what tags are global?

  • Unknown's avatar
    cinemaautopsy · Member ·

    Hi all

    I seem to be forever wrestling with how to make my tags work the way I want them to work. Anyway, stay with me as I do get to the point (and question).

    When creating my blog I had it set as private so all the tags that I used only linked within my own blog. That suited me fine so I began using the tags for people to cross reference within my own blog. When I was ready for my blog to go public I changed the settings and discovered that the tags automatically went global. This wasn’t ideal for me as I intended to have the tags only link within my blog. However, I figured that having my blog public (and therefore get picked up by search engines) was more important than keeping the tags within my own blog. I actually created my own external index page that continued to use the tags as I originally intended.

    Having now become stuck with global tags I figured I would use them to my best advantage so I added some generic tags such as “films” and “movies” to all my posts. However, I then found out that only 12 tags get picked up globally. So my question is, if I want to use more than 12 tags per post (which I frequently do for my own indexing purposes) then can I select which 12 tags go global and which ones get ignored by the global tagging searches?

    An example is my recent post on the film Watchmen. I really want the tag “Watchmen” to go global but I’m not fussed about most of the other tags that I’ve used – but I still want them on that post for my own indexing purposes.

    I hope all that makes sense. Please let me know if you want me to clarify anything about what I’m trying to achieve.

    Cheers
    Thomas

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    No you can’t differentiate. All categories and tags in your sidebar lead to your posts, all categories and tags in your posts lead to the global wp pages.

    And you’ve got a misnderstanding re “only 12 tags get picked up globally”: the correct is that if you have more than a combined total of 12 categories and tabs in a post you get excluded from the global pages.

  • Unknown's avatar
    panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    (“tabs” should read “tags”, of course.)

  • Unknown's avatar
    cinemaautopsy · Member ·

    Oh wow! That’s harsh. Thanks for clarifying panaghiotisadam. Boy do I wish I knew about that before I started setting my blog up the way I have. I’ve got some hard choices to make as I’m either going to have to loose the benefits of having global tag or I’m going to have to loose the functionality that I originally had hoped to give my blog in regards to cross referencing posts with related content. Rats.

    Anyway, thanks again for clarifying. I suppose it is the way it is to suit the great good and I’ve just been caught out for trying to do things differently. Story of my life!

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    You might consider going self-hosted, depending on your tech confidence. Then you would have the functionality you envision. You would, however, lose the global pages for good.

  • Unknown's avatar
    cinemaautopsy · Member ·

    Thanks for that raincoaster and I will keep that in mind. I think I will go self-hosted some day but I do lack the tech confidence (and time) to do so at the moment. So I’ll stay here in the mean time as right now the positives of having a COM account far outweigh the negatives (like not being able to do what I described above), which in the grand scheme of things are very, very minor.

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