Categories and Sub-Categories

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  livingmoonastrology · Member · Mar 21, 2010 at 1:47 am

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  Hi there, I need some help to understand better Categories and Sub-Categories.
  I have created few main Categories for my blog (about 8) and then added some categories to a few of them.
  My question is: if I tick a main Category before posting a piece, will that include also its Sub-Categories, or do I need to specify each Sub-Category in order to be picked up by the search engine?
  Any help on the subject would be greatly appreciated. Ciao, Paola Emma

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

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  panaghiotisadam · Member · Mar 21, 2010 at 2:05 am

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  Subcategories have to do with hierarchical display in your sidebar: a subcategory will show up indented under its parent category (if you have ticked the option “Show hierarchy” in the Categories widget).

  Other than that, no difference: to assign a post to a parent category and its subcategory, you need to tick both.

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  livingmoonastrology · Member · Mar 21, 2010 at 9:18 am

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  Thank you, you have answered my query. But another one popped up from the first.
  I read in some Forum that one shouldn’t have more than ten Categories at the most. Now that I know that Categories and Sub-Categories are really the same thing, this means that, if it is advisable to use fewer categories, this applies also to Sub-Categories?
  I am concerned to have too many Sub-Categories now, as I was told I had too many Categories before and that could have caused me technical problems or to be eventually ignored by the Search Engines.
  I am a bit confused because in a Beginners WordPress tutorial I also read that I can create as many Categories as I want.
  Could you perhaps clarify this for me?
  Thank you very much. Paola Emma

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  onoff · Member · Mar 21, 2010 at 9:25 am

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  Hi Paola, the suggestion to not have more than ten categories only applies to assigning a post to those categories. You can have as much categories (and sub categories) on your blogs as you want.

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  livingmoonastrology · Member · Mar 21, 2010 at 9:47 am

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  Thank you, onoff, I got it now, I think. Paola

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  timethief · Member · Mar 21, 2010 at 5:33 pm

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  When it comes to assigning categories and tags to posts the rule of thumb ought to be “less is more”. This is because more is not better if “more” amounts to irrelevant tags then the result will be worse placement for your blog posts in the SERPs (search engine results).

  Imagine you are in a library and some lame brained librarian was assigning a huge lot of categories and tags to books that did not accurately reflect their contents. You would be running around in circles trying to locate truly relevant books. The rule of thumb is to assign as few relevant categories and tags as possible that accurately pinpoint the content in the book. The same would hold true for readers who are using search engines to locate specific content.

  There is a reason for using more that a combined total of ten (10) categories and tags on your posts means that they will not be displayed on the wordpress.com global tagging pages. We have previously experienced bloggers who assigned huge blocks of irrelevant categories and tags to their posts. Some also used the same irrelevant and misleading blocks of tags and categories on each and every post in their blog.
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/global-tags/#missing-posts