Xentag: renaming tags

Discussion in 'Other' started by Forest, Dec 27, 2013.

  1. Forest

    Forest New Member

    Hello!

    When I attempt to rename a tag from within the Admin CP, I see a warning that, "The tag text that will be used and referenced throughout the system. It's not recommended to change this because it may break URLs or render strange search behaviors among other things." See the following thumbnail for an example:
    upload_2013-12-26_22-38-6.png

    We are in the process of overhauling how we tag threads and are planning to go through hundreds or even thousands of old threads and tag them. To improve our SEO, we want to optimize the tag_text of at least a small number of our tags.

    At first, we thought that the only problem with changing tag_text was that existing links to tag pages would break. For example, if we have a tag called mindfulness and Google has already found it, then it is expecting to see a page at ourdomain.com/forum/tags/mindfulness. If we rename the tag to "mindfulness meditation," then the existing tag page disappears and both visitors and search engine web spiders get 404s. While this isn't good, we figured that we could fix it with mod_rewrite and some 301 redirects. We're pretty serious about optimizing our tags, so we're happy to do that.

    But, as I've been exploring our database, I notice that the xentag installer adds a MEDIUMBLOB column called tinhte_xentag_tags to the xf_thread table. This stores the tags as strings in the row for the thread. Presumably, if the tag_tex is updated in the Admin CP, this field will not be updated.

    How much of a problem will this create? Is it something we could fix by running AdminCP>Tools>Rebuild Caches>Rebuild Tag Information?

    Thanks in advance for your help!
     
  2. xfrocks

    xfrocks XenForo rocks!
    Staff Member

    You should only change the casing of the text for example from "xenforo" to "XenForo".

    If you change its contents completely, it will break the connection completely between the tag and the thread. Maybe I'll add the code to update the association in the next version.
     
  3. Forest

    Forest New Member

    Adding that feature really would be terrific from our perspective. As a small forum, we have to optimize everything and depend on SEO, so if we can tweak popular tags, that would really help.

    I've just checked and the red X to delete a tag from the ACP seems like it could be an alternative for when the number of tagged contents is low enough to count on one hand (as is often the case at this point for us). If we want to rename a "small tag" like this from the ACP, we open "Tagged Contents" in a new tab and then open each of the individual items in their own tabs. Then we use the red X to delete the original tag and manually add the new tag to each of the threads.

    It certainly sounds laborious, but it would work, right?
     
  4. xfrocks

    xfrocks XenForo rocks!
    Staff Member

    Yes, that would work.
     
  5. Forest

    Forest New Member

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