Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
by ewuhic on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:00PM
(#30074326)
Didn't google punish your site for having duplicate entries under different urls?
Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”
by fellowniusmonk on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @02:06PM
(#30076446)
I might not have been clear enough I think. I can clarify further if the below is insufficient.
That was the point of labeling 1 version of any duplicated permutation "canonical", to prevent duplicate content penalties.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
"expert/american" and "american/expert" couldn't have duplicate content so you take your tag system and overlay hierarchies.
Anything that wasn't manually set was auto hierarchied based on highest traffic volume.
I also prevented tags from showing up on the same tag chain, so any given keyword could only appear once. That prevented infinite recursion.
Moving away from hierarchy also made interesting permutations easier to generate.
Since any metadata can become a tag, price or price range ($100hr – $300hr) is easy to generate and "enhance" American/Experts/Between$100and$300anhour.
It worked really well, allowed us to manually enforce high traffic hierarchies/phrases while still auto-generating intelligent canonical links for the rest of the site.