If blog categories are a way to filter content so a reader can get to the topics they want to read. Then why do so many bloggers use multiple categories, or worse a new category for each post? Think of categories as buttons on a nav bar directing people to sections of a site. You would not create a different button for each post otherwise the nav bar would extend into next week.
Using more than one category for blog posts creates duplicate content and SE’s do not like this. They assume you are trying to trick them into thinking you have more content on your site. Back in the early days of SEO webmasters would create pages and pages of duplicate content to make their site rank better. SE’s caught on and put and end to it by checking sites for duplicate content
You can avoid this by choosing one category for each post and only choose 2-3 tags. Don’t bother going back and changing all the old posts to all have the same category as your post have already been searched by the bots and the damage is done.
Moving forward you need to make a list of the categories you will be using in the future. The shorter this list the better. Why? You will be creating a tighter focus on your niche. Your blog postings will become more focused and The SE’s will go through your blog category links and when all the links have the same keywords the ranking will go up.
Think about these two scenarios. Google comes to your site with 100 blog posts and 25 have the same category and 75 are all random or Google visits and all posts have the same category that reflects the content. Which do you think Google will rank higher? I vote for scenario two.
So what have we learned in this post? That too many categories can cause unnecessary duplicate content and less categories forces you to write more focused blog posts that will organically enrich your SEO.
If you need to separate content then use tags but do so sparingly as these too create duplicate content. A lot of people think tags are keywords for search engines and its not true. A better option if you are on Wordpress is the all in one seo plugin . This plugin allows you to add keywords that get written into the head of the html and SE’s will read them.
Hope this helps your choices when creating categories
