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Categories or Tags or both?

2 points by larryfreeman ↗ HN
HubPages.com, the startup where I work, has recently added three-level categories in addition to tags. This goes against the much of the current thinking in web design right now (for example gmail).

We found in our experience that tags are not enough. We believe that adding categories in addition to tags will increase search engine traffic and make it easier to navigate between "hubs" (our term for articles published on HubPages).

What do you think? Do categories have a place in web sites or are tags enough? So far, the response to HubPages has been mostly positive (see blog.hubpages.com).

2 comments

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fraying
I've struggled with this, too, both in my web work and work for clients. What I've come to is, yes, you can use both, but only if the categories are tightly controlled.

For example, a site could have main categories that describe the type of content (essay, photograph, video) and then use tags to describe what the content is about. That way, the content is sortable by type (ie category) and content (ie tag).

larryfreeman
Interesting point. If you I understand you correctly, you are saying that a category should be a higher level of abstraction than a tag.