Everytime you add a tag to a post, WordPress automatically creates a URL of this type : yoursite.com/tag/<tagName>. In this tutorial, we will see how to remove these tag URLs from WordPress, so they disappear completely from your website.
Why would we want to do that ? Well, having too many of these URLs can be really bad for SEO, as Google indexes them all. This can cause them to appear in search results instead of the actual posts you want people to see. You could still tell Google not to index them, but in my opinion, it is better to remove them completely, as they aren't very useful for visitors.
1) Access the database WordPress uses
To remove the URLs, you will need access to the database. You can usually do that through your hosting provider's website. You should land on a page called phpMyAdmin, which is a common tool used to display databases. It looks like this :
Click on the database name on the left side. You will land on a page that displays all the tables your database contains. It looks like this :
2) Find the table containing tag URLs
The table containing tag URLs is called wp_terms. Do a quick search in your browser (type ctrl+F) and search for wp_terms. There is only one table which has this exact name, so you can't go wrong.
Once you have found the table, click on it. You will now see all the tags and categories WordPress created, along with some other lines if you have plugins installed.
3) Delete the tags for which you want to remove URLs
Now, imagine you have a tag called "fashion" and you want to remove the URL yoursite.com/tag/fashion. It's very simple : just find the line with the corresponding tag and click delete. Open the URL in your browser to check it has effectively disappeared !
Be careful not to make mistakes when deleting lines : your WordPress categories are also in there and you probably don't want to remove them.
That's it ! Now you are rid of all these unwanted URLs, and you SEO should start improving dramatically.
