Still As Life

I like my things to be organised, though as many will testify, my things appear quite the opposite, except of course for things such as my tax and other money related things.

For anyone that has seen my desks, aside from the keyboard and mouse space, they are piled with various papers, documents, letters, computer pieces, stationary and so on. However, there is order and organisation. Everything has a certain spot, they are just often buried in that spot.

My blog also needs to be organised. I have been using the dated archives as I like things to be available sequentially by time. I also have been using categories to categorise each post. However, posts often belong in multiple categories. This can make things somewhat difficult with my URL structure as it means I have to set the most appropriate category to go in the URL. I like this structure so I don’t want to change it.

Of course some posts are also related by things that do not have their own category, and in my opinion, shouldn’t. Tags don’t affect my URL structure, and allow me to create relations between multiple posts quite easily. This does create some duplicate content, but no more than putting posts in multiple categories.

Now, when reading about search engine optimisation and so on, I frequently see things saying that duplicate content is bad and has a negative effect on search results. I can see this being correct if its the same content on multiple domains, however, as you may have noticed, I have been tagging things for a while now. This doesn’t seem to have damaged my search results at all, if anything, it has improved them.

Using tags also allows for some other interesting things, such as tag clouds and related posts by tags. I’m not using tag clouds, but it is interesting to look at.

What are your thoughts on tagging, categories and so on? Do you prefer just one, or a combination of them?

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