Tags: None of my tags show up on google when I do a search

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  michellesheartsongs · Member · Oct 31, 2011 at 6:51 am

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  I’m wondering why when I do a search on Google for my tags – it never brings up my post or my blog. Am i doing something wrong?

  Thanks

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

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  panaghiotisadam · Member · Oct 31, 2011 at 9:03 am

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  If you mean whether your site and your tags are indexed by Google, they are. You can check it by putting this in the Google search bar of your browser:
  TAG HERE+site:http://michellesheartsongs.wordpress.com/

  If you mean you just type one of your tags in the search bar and don’t find your blog, then of course you don’t. The less characteristic a tag, the more the pages that will be brought up. The lower your page rank, the more the pages that will be brought up before yours. For example, if you just type, say, Loving What Is in the Google search bar, you’re asking Google to search for any webpage with the word “love” or the word “what” or the word “is” on it; if you type the same phrase inside quotation marks, you’re asking Google to search for any webpage with that phrase on it. In both cases your blog posts will be drowned among countless other webpages, more popular ones showing up before yours. And “Loving What Is” is the title of a book, so the first results will be popular webpages that talk about the book, with Amazon coming first, of course.

  Moreover, categories are more important tan tags. Tags have been greatly abused in the past, so search engines nowadays pay more attention to your content rather than your tags:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A96yDPqa2rs

  In addition:

  • For the global wp.com tag pages, categories and tags are the same thing: tags.

  • As far as the organization of your blog is concerned, categories should be the main sub-groups of your posts while tags (optional) should be other keywords associated with the content of a particular post. But a category and a tag with the same name are the same piece of data: if you edit the one the other will change as well.

  For these reasons, never use the same word or phrase as both a category and a tag: there’s absolutely no point doing that plus you’ll run into technical problems if you do it.