Tags & URL categorization

The tags report provides an overview of your categorized URLs: you see here the number and ratio of URLs in the different categories you defined.

Tag distribution overview
Tag distribution overview

Once the URLs will be categorized, you will be able to use the meaningful "by tag" distribution graphs in the other reports.

URL categorization

Before diving into reports, we recommend to categorize the URLs with tags, to have meaningful "by tag" distribution graphs. To know more about URL categorization, please first read our blog post "categorize URLs for SEO audit". In it, you will find useful tips for WordPress, Magento and Prestashop. You should categorize URLs in a useful way to get insights and quickly identify issues, for example by template.

Although you can tag URLs in every screen of Hextrakt, it's better from the "Tags" report because this is where you get the tag distribution graph.

Note: if you run another crawl in the same project, the URLs already categorized retain their tag, so that you don't have to categorize them again.

Three steps:

URL tagging
URL tagging

1. Filter and select URLs to tag with advanced URL explorer

First step is to select the URLs to which you will add a tag. You can select URLs manually by checking them in the table or doing a simple search, but most of the time you will use the advanced URL explorer.

Note: advanced URL explorer may be used to isolate or filter specific URLs for example for URL tagging (this is what this article is about),  and to create custom reports.

Advanced URL explorer
Advanced URL explorer

If you want to tag all your product URLs, you need to find a common feature for these URLs, and use it to select them. They may have a specific pattern in common in the URL or in the title, or, better, the use of schema.org structured data, or a specific body class tag for the product template (that's the case for several CMS).

Be careful when you use a pattern in the URL to categorize. Let's say you want to tag all your product pages, you could create a filter for URLs that contain /product/. But this kind of filter would also select URL like /wishlist/index/add/product/6312/... which is not what you want. If URL patterns are your only option, first tag the URLs which contain wishlist (this is just an example), then select URLs which contain product AND whose tag is empty to add them the "product" tag.

To select URLs matching a specific template, most of the time you will use data like:

  • Body class
  • Body id
  • Schema.org itemtype
  • Title
  • URL pattern
  • ...

If you want to differentiate WordPress templates, like pages, posts, categories, you can use the body "class" attribute in the advanced URL explorer.

2. Select URLs

To select filtered URLs, simply click on the top of the selection column (on the left), this will select all the URLs matching the search filter.

3. Tag URLs

The filtered URLs are displayed in the table and selected, you can now add a tag to them.

To create a tag:

Create tag
Create a tag

Click on the "Tag selected URLs" button > Manage Tags > Add a tag > OK.

To add a tag to some URLs:

Filter URLs with advanced URLs explorer > select them by checking all (or manually) > click on the tag name.

Some tips to categorize URLs:

  • Start tagging by using more specific filters and become less and less specific.
  • To see untagged URLs in the URL table (in the "Tags report"), refresh the data and click on the untagged pages number link ("xxx pages").
  • When selecting URLs to tag with the advanced URLs explorer, in order not to overwrite existing tags, you can add the filter “Tag empty” to exclude already tagged URLs from your selection.
  • Do not create too many tags at first.