Since the upcoming WordPress 2.3 release will debut the new tagging system, I thought I’d take some time to address what it means to use “tags” versus using “categories”. These things mean different things to different people, as it’s really just a matter of how you want to use them. But let’s examine what tags and categories are, how they are similar, how they are different, and why you might choose to use one system over the other, or use them together.
What are categories?
A dictionary definition of category is, “A specifically defined division in a system of classification.” If you break that down, and consider what is meant by “a system of classification”, you’ll come to the conclusion that this refers to a highly structured, possibly hierarchical system. For example, to borrow from the classification system for living things, you might have a tree like “Animals -> Vertebrates -> Mammals -> Horses”. Any of those terms could be considered to be a category, and they fall into a strict structure.
What are tags?
In their most common usage, tags are keywords that you attach to a piece of content. Tags are “free-form”, which is to say that there is no formal restriction on what tags you attach. So, the basic difference between categories and tags is that categories are structured and tags are unstructured. For examples of popular web services that make good use of tags, see Flickr, Technorati, and Delicious, among others.
On the other hand, the help pages at Technorati define tags thusly: “Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos and videos with any tag that makes sense.” They’re saying that tags are categories — so, are categories and tags different, or not?
How are categories and tags different?
If a tag can be thought of as a category, then how are they different? It really just comes down to how you use them. Typically, as we mentioned above, category systems are structured. In a given system, the categories are usually chosen with as little overlap as possible. Look at your typical mainstream news site — you’ll probably see categories like Politics, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, and Lifestyle. The breadth of these categories covers just about any imaginable news story.
The problem arises when a story does overlap multiple thematic categories. What if you have a story about iRobot’s newest model of Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner — do you file it under Business, Tech, or Lifestyle? In many systems, you can assign multiple categories. But even in that case, there are often reasons to specify a primary category. Slashdot is a good example — if you look at their main page, each story has a single icon which represents the primary category. This is a quick visual indicator which helps you identify stories that might interest you. Then, if you click into a specific article, you’ll see the icons of other categories that the story fits into.
And in a strict category system, visitors using your search feature might use terms that don’t appear in the content or category names. What if Alice was trying to find the Roomba story, but couldn’t remember the name of the device or its manufacturer? She might try a search for “gadget”, or “carpet”, but maybe those terms were never in the story. This is where tags can help refine searches by giving additional keywords. If our story had tags like “business, technology, tech, lifestyle, gadget, floor, carpet, vacuum, cleaning, household, home, robot, robotics” and other relevant terms, then there are lots of extra hooks for searches to latch onto.
Which should I use?
There are some people who have discarded the hard structure of categories in favor of the free-form nature of tags. There are a few folks who prefer the clean thematic separation of a category system, and avoid the messiness of inconsistent tags. But most folks should feel free to get the best of both worlds. A while back, I started using my categories as tags. I create new categories on the fly, as seems fit. But I’ve gradually started to regret that decision. What I really wanted was to have both a category to specify the overall main theme for each post, and a set of tags to aid in searching.
In WordPress prior to version 2.3, the “category” system could be used as a “tag” system simply by the nature of how the user chose to express them. The difference was simply a matter of semantics. The same holds true with the new tagging system in WP 2.3, really — it’s all a matter of how you choose to use the underlying system. But the availability of a flexible taxonomy system now provides a way to clearly delineate a separation between “categories” and “tags”, and even user-created tertiary categorization systems. Previously, this type of flexibility was only possible through third-party plugins.
Whether you choose to stick with distinct categories, tags, or a combination of both, is really a matter of your personal preferences. But whichever path you choose, WordPress will be able to give you the tools you need to organize your content the way that you like.
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Great explanation! Thanks.
… but has WordPress ever implemented true categories?
You state that “it’s a matter of how you choose to use the underlying system”. I very much disagree 😉 Categories are defined, as you very correctly explain, by a hierarchy. If there’s no hierarchy it’s “just” tags (or keywords). My question is then, how do you make a hierarchy with WP cats? You can’t, therefore they’re actually tags and therefore I don’t see the big difference between the new tags in rel. 2.3 and the categories.
Yes, you might in the future choose to treat the tags as, well tags, and the categories as a second semantic structure in the sense of keywords. But a hierarchic (category) structure, no.
Please enlighten me if there’s something I’ve completely missed.
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I’m terribly excited for it. Of course, I likely won’t have time to mess with it. :sigh:
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I’m using WP categories as a hierarchy, so not sure how to respond to “true categories”.
Sadly enough WP 2.3 looses some functionality with hierarchic category structure, as it will not allow two sub-categories with the same name. This is a blocker for my site which uses wordpress as a CMS.
@Jens Brogaard
You can make hierarchical categories with WP. Go to Admin > Manage > Categories. When you create a new category you can assign it to a parent category. There you have the beginnings of a tree structure.
In sidebar.php how you code wp_list_categories() will determine if sub-categories are indented, displayed or not. The default is to display sub-categories. Play with parameters ‘hierarchical’ and ‘child_of’.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories
Hope this helps.
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Tags are really something I don’t understand why it went core. Seems to me that everybody feeling the need to use them was happy with plugins like UTW. And seems to me that a big majority was simply not using them.
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Nice explanation. I’m really looking forward to built-in tag support in WP 2.3. I like to have as few plug-ins as possible running in my WP installation.
FurrTrap, you hit the nail on the head – thank you very much for the clarification.
But… with the possibility of “tagging” one post to multiple categories it works (also) as a tag system (if you don’t make use of hierarchies). A true hierarchical system wouldn’t allow files/posts to be put in multiple folder/categories.
The existent WP categories I would therefore coin ‘tag categories’ which are great to use for grouping tags since they tend to bloat. Without any apparent advantages I would take care of using the new tags especially considering there is no global tag list (for managing)…
@Jens Brogaard & Ozh
I guess we all have different points of view regarding the meaning of tag and category. But I think our overall aim is to make a WP weblog as informative as we can, by using tags and/or categories in a way that assists the reader to find what they want quickly.
For me, I’m using categories as a thematic index, a broad stroke. When I start to use tags, it will be to provide much finer granularity, a more detailed index of article content that will probably span multiple categories.
Well that’s the idea and I haven’t really looked at UTW yet, it’s supposed to offer strong tag management.
One way or another, I’ll definitely use tags and categories together with the intention of making things as easy to find as possible.
I think WP is a powerful and flexible system, especially with all the plugin authors about. So hopefully, it should satisfy all our diverse needs 🙂
Great post, looking forward to the new WordPress 2.3
Great addition. Tags will help me organize things a heck of a lot better at my blog.
John
At the moment I am using categories with tags and it is really helping in users find my site easily on search engines. However I have 1 question with tags.
What is the final variation of it?
For e.g. I can have studies, study or studying. All of which mean the same thing, what is the kind of naming convention of tags which users look at? Is there any fixed one? Or which naming convention would you use in this case?
Hope I can get some help here.
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Running a pop culture website, we’re using categories as a broad stroke like DVD and Television and Reviews. Tags we use for things that can move across categories: for example, we have a bunch of posts that involve Vincent Price (as every site should). It doesn’t make sense to have a “Vincent Price” category, however, so we have a vincent-price tag. If you want to see all the posts with that tag, you can got to tag/vincent-price/ and be a happy camper.
I’ve been very pleased with UTW but I agree that the less plugins the better, at least in my setup. I’m looking forward to playing with conversion to the built-in tags. I hope it doesn’t sting too much.
My question is why I want to use this vs. Ultimate Tag Warrior – which I have configured perfectly on my site.
I’ve tagged hundreds of posts using that — will I lose all of those tags if I try to switch to the new tagging system? And will these tags help me SEO like Technorati tags do?
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Hope I can get some help here.
Thanks Dougal – this cleared a few things up for me.
I’m still a bit fuzzy on a couple of things though…
1. How do tags benefit *users*? Is it just another way for them to navigate a site?
2. Is there any benefit for the *publisher* such as SEO? Does Technorati index tags for example?
Cheers.
Waydomatic:
Tags benefit users by offering better in-site search options. In addition to providing more terms on which to search, the new tag API allows you to do ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ searches.
And yes, there are SEO benefits, because the tags are indexed by Technorati and other services which can understand
rel="tag"
attributes. WordPress also puts reltag on categories, but again, we’re adding more keyword richness into the mix.I imagine that we’ll also start seeing more plugins which will allow you to mashup your own post tags with tags from other services. So you might be able to automagically insert photos from your Flickr photo stream with matching tags, or provide a list of related web pages from your Delicious tags or from a Technorati search.
Personally, I prefer the hierarchical category structure. Perhaps, it is just how my theme is set up? But, I simply select only one category per post and the post is automatically included in all the categories above it.
Tags as used in deli.cio.us are just single word keywords. Doesn’t work out very well at all, IMHO. Doesn’t work well, as in I sure do waste a heck of a lot of time mucking about with tags. Using multiple word tags and bundles, helps somewhat.
The problem with categories is that most bloggers are totally lacking in design skills.
THX for explanation. Big number of category terms and tags can looks messy, but built-in tag systems in WordPress 2.3 is significant and the most wanted feature.
Anyone know if the tags provided by plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior are compatible with WordPress 2.3 ?
somebody knew the plugin for the tag cloud?
regards paul
I’m afraid to upgrade. I can’t remember which style sheets and php files outside my theme I’ve altered. 🙂
If you search a plugin as like UTW for WordPress 2.3
Use Simple Tags !
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags/
Autocompletion, mass edit, etc.
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I’m thinking about switching from categories to tags – however I do have some concern that I’m going to produce hell of duplicated content and the searchengines will kick me out of the index. Does anyone have experience with this issue? Thx, Andi
I noticed Snakefoot’s response above a reference to 2.3 no longer allowing two subcategories with the same name. So if one has parent categories, say “Business” and “Fashion”, and within each of those has the subcategories of “writers”, “events” and “news”, does that mean 1/2 of these subcategories need to be renamed? This would seem a rather odd step backward for those heavily relient on categories in their cms. Can someone confirm this?
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Mhh I’d like to start using tags to get listed in technorati but I’m hesitant because I think I might get hit with duplicate content penalties by Google …
wow i didnt even notice there’s tags in wordpress 2.3
I need HELP!! Pardon me, but you have written down my thoughts exactly.
“A while back, I started using my categories as tags. I create new categories on the fly, as seems fit. But I’ve gradually started to regret that decision. What I really wanted was to have both a category to specify the overall main theme for each post, and a set of tags to aid in searching.”
So, when I first started using tags, I used UTW to turn the categories into tags. However, now my edit post screen STILL includes upwards of 70 categories. I never deleted them, just in case. Since WP23 now supports tags, there is no need for UTW, and I feel more confident that I don’t need as many categories… Care to give me all the steps I should take to not lose any tags while completing this transition? I plan to delete sub-subcategories, and use categories as a GENERAL category (as I believe is intended).
Coming back to my post from Oct28th. Does anyone have experience reagrdsing duplicated content? Thx
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@Andi- just ‘nofollow’ the tag links any anything else you don’t want the search engines to follow. Then don’t worry about the penalty. 😀
Snakefoot and Owen hit the nail on the head for me.
WordPress is now at 2.6, and this is still broken.
You cannot create a real hierarchy with categories, because it doesn’t take into consideration the parent.
ie.
/local/news/
/international/news/
This is not possible. Unless I’m missing something?
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Flashforward to WordPress 3.4, and they still haven’t addressed the problem of categories and hierarchy. I just normally work around this using pages, but is there any real solution to this? A good plugin for instance?
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