What is the real difference between Tags and categories

[virgohippy]

Tags are more organic, categories are more of a long-term organizational architecture.

The biggest advantage of tags is that they can be added on demand and dropped when no longer in use. They're a quick and dirty way to organize content, very much in line with the way people tend to think anyway. Especially handy when you have multiple authors who might not know how to "categorize" from a list of available categories, but can easily assign "keywords" or "tags" to a piece of content.

Note, some tag search engines (like technorati) see this url structure "domain.com/tags/sometag" as a tag page.

[whitey]

Originally Posted by virgohippy

Tags are more organic, categories are more of a long-term organizational architecture.

The biggest advantage of tags is that they can be added on demand and dropped when no longer in use. They're a quick and dirty way to organize content, very much in line with the way people tend to think anyway. Especially handy when you have multiple authors who might not know how to "categorize" from a list of available categories, but can easily assign "keywords" or "tags" to a piece of content.

Note, some tag search engines (like technorati) see this url structure "domain.com/tags/sometag" as a tag page.

That is a very good perspective on organizational structure.

I would also add that categories and tags are treated somewhat differently by search engines.

If you are using an SEO plugin like All in One SEO, you can have meta-tags on your primary Category pages.

With tags, as you described, they are more one keyword, organic in the search results.

Generally, you do not want both indexed as they are often duplicative. I generally opt to have tags indexed when the subject of the blog does not have clear, identifiable, finite categories. I have categories indexed where there are identifiable and finite categories. It also somewhat depends on the theme one is using and how one is organzing the theme.

Finally, tags are very relevant for news type blogs as the newsy type blog aggregators (such as Technorati) focus on tags, while with SE's I tend to have better search results on Categories (because of ability to use meta-tags I think).

[walrus]

Wow is technorati still around! Seems to me the social bookmarks have pretty much made it irrelevant.

The way I had it explained to me is that tags are your posts keywords where the category is a means of dividing up separate thoughts.

The best example I can come up with is if you have a food blog. You may have categories like salads, pies, etc. Now lets say you write a post about how to make a cherry pie, then cherry pie would be the tag and the post would be filed under the pie category.

For adult, you have a niche blog, categories would be the sub-niche and tags would be the descriptor in the text.

[Flip]

Technorati was very good to me a 5 or so years ago...

Haven't really had a look at it for a long time...

Nice analogy Walrus...

What I do know is Google in particular sends folks to me more from tags than catergories...

[walrus]

What I noticed is that when I quit bothering with Technorati my comment spam went way down.

I had felt for awhile that Technorati was the source of lots of the comment spam I was getting but one day when I was checking traffic stats and noticed that a damn comment spammer was third in my referrers list. Well, I haven't submitted a site there since.

They were really good to me too, in the early days, but now I don't see much use for it.

[faxxaff]

I see tags as an additional navigation tool for surfers. An appealing tag in a strategic position at the and of an article can be an incentive to digg deeper into the blog.

I find it useless for seo or site structure unless you interlink tags from within articles on a more or less frequent basis.