In this article:
Introduction
When you set up tags, it’s important to think ahead about what kinds of questions you may want to answer in the future. This article will list all of the tags currently available in RankSense, and some of the points to think about ahead of time.
Remember that a tag or tags will be applied to every URL present in a given rules sheet. If you want to tag some pages with one tag and other pages with a different tag, you must create two separate rules sheets.
However, it is fine to use one sheet if all URLs in the sheet will share the same tags. For example, if you are adding meta descriptions to all of your blog pages, you can use the issue tag “missing meta description,” the solution tag “add optimized meta descriptions” and the affected tag “blog pages.”
For information on how to apply the tags in RankSense, please see “How to tag SEO rules.”
Issue tags
The issue tags are used to identify what issues are present on a page. The current issue tags are:
- Unexpected (high) crawl rate
- Unexpected (low) crawl rate
- Incorrect pages indexed
- Important pages not indexed
- Exact duplicate content
- Near duplicate content
- No duplicate content
- Paginated pages not indexed
- Pagination issues
- Missing meta descriptions
- Low quality meta descriptions
- Low quality title tags
- Stale content
- Users landing on incorrect country pages
- Users landing on incorrect language pages
In theory, issue tags can be used completely by themselves if you would like to track pages with a particular issue. However, they are more often used in combination with a solution tag. Say for example you are planning to canonicalize pages because of duplicate content. You can tag the issue as “exact duplicate content” or “near duplicate content,” depending on the case. If you have both present, tags can help you determine whether the change was effective for both exact and near duplicate content. You may also be canonicalizing pages without duplicate content to consolidate them.
Pages that have different reasons to canonicalize could be given the same solution tag, so tagging with an issue tag will allow you to differentiate between them later on.
Solution tags
Solution tags are arguably the most important tags in RankSense. They identify what fixes have been applied to a given page, which enables you to validate the effectiveness of your changes. The current solution tags are:
- Add hreflang tags
- Experiment Group A
- Experiment Group B
- Experiment Group C
- Experiment Group D
- Control Group A
- Control Group B
- Add robots.txt directives
- Consolidation with HTTP canonicals
- Add optimized meta descriptions
- Revert existing meta descriptions
- Remove robots.txt directives
- Add noindex tags
- Consolidation with redirects
- Consolidation with canonicals
- Remove consolidation with canonicals
- Add correct canonicals
- Add view all canonicals
- Add optimized title tags
- Revert existing title tags
- Redirects to relevant pages
- Add index tags
By consistently applying a solution tag every time you use RankSense to implement changes or implement SEO changes without RankSense, you will be able to use the most powerful features in RankSense:
- Tracking when search engines pick up your changes
- Monitoring performance and validating that your changes were effective
This enables you to learn from your efforts at a granular level.
The experimental and control group tags are explained more in the A/B testing article. The experimental group tags can also be used to monitor changes implemented without RankSense, particularly if there is not an appropriate tag available. If you choose to do so, please keep track of what each tag is used for.
We are also open to feedback on our tags, so feel free to contact us if there are tags that you would like to see added.
Affected tags
Affected tags are used to identify the types of pages on the site. These tags can be used to later identify whether certain types of pages were impacted more or less than other types, or to simply track the performance of pages by type.
If you plan to use affected tags, please create a separate rules sheet for each type of page. If you include more than one type of page on the same sheet, the software will consider all URLs on the sheet to be multiple types (i.e. both a product page and a category page).
The current affected tags are:
- Home page
- Product pages
- Category pages
- Information pages
- Blog pages
- News pages
- Account pages
- Review pages
- User pages
- Forum pages
Custom tags
Custom tags are planned for the near future. Stay tuned!