Photo by TimWilson
Every blog has categorization function which helps you sort your blog post for readers who only wanted to read some type of your posts instead of everything you have written.
With Year 2008 coming up, one of the main thing that you should do will be cleaning up your blog posts categorization. This process can be as simple as doing nothing if you have always been systematic. However, if you are the kind who sometimes rush a post and have put the posts under the wrong section, the cleaning up is proved vital.
Reasons for Categories Cleaning
- Breaking up big categories
- Resorting of your articles
- Balancing the number of posts in categories
I am sure many out there do clean up their categories with reasons more than the above. Do you clean up your categories and why do you clean it? Share it with me.
I am writing this today because I will be busy cleaning up all my blogs these few days to welcome the new year. I will be sharing a few tips that I used when I am cleaning my categories.
5 Tips of Categories Cleaning
Keep the numbers low
I have seen blogs have 20 or even 30 categories! Categories are supposed to help readers to choose what they want to read easier but too much of it will also send out the message to your readers that your blog isn’t that focused on a particular topic.
Having a lot of categories will also mean the posts contained inside one category will be lesser and when people look at a small number, they might think the blog is new or even not well-maintained.
Photo by blmurch
Periodical review
Categories are supposed to be reviewed by yourself once in a while to make sure that it is tidy. I do it now, welcoming Year 2008 but supposedly, it can be done once every six months or at any time set by yourself.
However, rearranging it always might slow down the process of search engines spiders on crawling your articles. Find an optimum timeline and the most important thing is that you can perform this task when you are free. Getting the task into a tight timetable won’t get it done nicely.
Related blog as reference
I am sure that the topic you are blogging right now have some other people out there blogging about it. The best thing to do when you are thinking of what categories to be created for blogs in your topic will be by referencing other people’s work.
It will be much more easier and clearer to you on what to add, modify and deleted from your list of categories.
Permalink structure
Remember what I have said about permalinking? When you have set your blog permalink settings, the best is not to change the structure any more. Changing the structure might get your search engine readers tonnes of 404 errors.
When you start a blog, don’t ever include "categories" into the permalink structure. This will make things easier when you are cleaning up your categories section. My opinion on the best permalink structure will be what I am using on Wayne Liew Dot Com Blogging Tips Blog.
Relevance
This doesn’t happen anywhere but I do see some of the blogs out there actually have a category with all the posts inside irrelevant. Always open up a "General" category like the "Blogging" category I have in this blog so that when you post something that is not specific, the post can go into the General category instead of simply placing it under a irrelevant category.
Relevance does not only help your readers get what they want faster, it also helps search engine to index your page properly according to the relevance of your articles.
What is your say on blog post categorization?
Will you be carrying out a blog cleanup such as clearing up your categories? What other tips you have to offer to others? I am sure you have seen some blogs with good and bad categorization. Share with us what you think is the good and bad of their methods used.
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December 14th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
I have like 100+ categories.
Didn’t think category will make any differences. This article really changed my mine though, however don’t have the time to review my categories. 
December 14th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
SEO-wise deleting any existing category or removing a post from a category is not a good idea as these pages that are already indexed in search engines might cause some visitor to follow to your site and will be shown a 404 error. Similarly if you remove a category from a post the indexed page may still contain a part of post in category page but visitor will not find any! Think ahead and think google that deleted page must have some PR and was linking within your site, and you will miss the juice.
December 15th, 2007 at 7:26 am
“Will you be carrying out a blog cleanup such as clearing up your categories?”
I think I have done some of what you mentioned from time to time.
“What other tips you have to offer to others?”
domainname/post-slug is the best permalink structure? Just repeating what you mentioned.
Other than that, can reduce the length of category, for example mine is
ahkong.net/cat/babes/
instead of
ahkong.net/category/babes/
Besides than that, I think having parent and child categories is good also?
“I am sure you have seen some blogs with good and bad categorization.”
Hmmm. Not sure.
“Share with us what you think is the good and bad of their methods used.”
I think having parents and childs categories is a good method?
Besides that, I think setting up RSS specifically for categories is do-able also if one has the time? A reader might only be interested in one or a few categories and not everything in the site?
Cheers!
December 16th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I’ve definitely got some cleaning up to do too; thanks for the reminder! I’ve been trying to maintain my categories properly but there’s got to be some stuff out of place. Also, I have one category, the “earnings” category that I haven’t updated in months and has only two posts or so - yikes!
December 16th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
wow.. everytime i come in here… i bring out some knowledge.. thanks for sharing
December 16th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
@ kljs
What if you stop blogging for one day and try to work things out?
@ Jalaj
If you have used the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin for Wordpress, you can stop Google bots from indexing your categories pages. This will make deleting your categories done easily.
As for posts inside a category, moving it around will not be a problem if the permalink of the posts doesn’t contain any categories in it.
@ Deimos
Parent and child. Hmm, I think I can work something on this blog with this tip.
About the RSS for categories only suggestion, I think it is only good for newspaper sites where tonnes of articles are popping out every day. One blog post a day won’t need that I guess…
@ Tay
Looks like you need to show some earnings stats there.
@ ahlost
Glad that you always learned something from my articles.
December 27th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Nah, actually that’s not true. There are many plugins which will place a 301 redirect on your old permalink structure. So all your posts retain their ranking even if you change the permalink…
December 28th, 2007 at 12:23 am
i’ve 13 categories so far. my upper limit is 15, but i try not to add anymore categories. less categories are better, but must be kept relevant to posts inside.
when required, i’ll change the category names to a new one more relevant instead of adding another one.
December 28th, 2007 at 6:24 am
@ Ruchir
I know there are many redirection plugins out there but I am still not sure that redirection will pass on the search engine juice well.
@ Louis
Getting over 15 is surely too much. I am trying to cut down the number of categories on this blog as well since it is at 20.
December 28th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Wayne - what a great post and I couldn’t agree more. A periodic review also points out categories I need to post about if they’re lacking
I recently made the mistake you mentioned and changed my permalink to put the date at then end versus front - OMG what havoc I wreaked - wish I’d read this 3 weeks ago - the end result is 1/3 of my articles are not indexed now - I’ve been told that Google will respider - but how frustrating when you’ve worked up to being indexed in just over 1 hour - Grrrrr
Lots of great info - glad Michael Martine introduced us - I’ve subscribed to keep from making other mistakes
I’ve also learned the importance of keyword rich catergories
December 30th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Thanks for subscribing. It’s still OK for you to realize the mistake now instead of realizing it later on after your blog has a huge database of posts.
Keyword rich categories also help search engine to identify the relevance of your posts.