I don’t write on this blog enough. Sometimes I just can’t muster up the effort to write. I hate writing and this is a way to force me to do it. I had some time yesterday so I wrote a post about the beautiful day that it was. After writing that post I was looking through my dashboard and noticed I had 563 tags for my posts. I remembered reading somewhere about people who put a lot of tags on their posts just to get traffic. A tag whore as it were. I guess I had become one.
I went through the tags right at that moment to try to cull out the ones that are just dumb. Looking through the list I was somewhat embarrassed. Not that anyone reads this blog but the infrequent few who stumble upon it must think me a moron. I found tags that were exactly the same except for a space such as “barackobama” and “barack obama.” Others that were misspelled “mortgage” and “mortage,” and even more that there was a capitalization difference “mitt romney” and “Mitt Romney.” I found others that included names from articles and unnecessary tags just to get readers.
The worse/most useles tag was one for Elliotte Friedman. I had several different tags that I used to link to his weekly articles. For those who don’t know he is a writer for one of the Canadian TV networks and covers the NHL. This really put me in the tag whore hall of fame. I don’t think I have linked to one of his articles on months. What I had noticed was that most of my page views were from poor saps that did a search on him and my useless tags directed them to this site. What they found was an old link to an old article. What a waste of time for them. Now they just hit the back button and keep searching, but that meant a page view for me. Woo hoo!
No more! I refuse to be a tag whore.
I have gotten rid of most of the tags, and am now down to less than 50. I tried to keep them primarily topical rather than a person or issue, and to things that I would write about. I probably could cut out another 50 or so but I will do that over time. Now to go through the categories to be better organized.