I’m migrating from Blogger to WordPress this week and right now I’m going through all my porn blog posts (300+ of them) retagging them, tweaking their URLs etc.
Luckily I discovered a problem before I got to the end, but it’s a stupid issue…
With tags you can have the tag name and a tag slug and they can be different. That’s great until you want to add the tag to another post… Let’s say you have a tag on your post “Porn Star Jarod Steel” (/tag/jarod-steel). If you then go in and add another tag (doesn’t matter what), it will change the slug on the existing tag to match the tag name. So suddenly your tag URL is now /tag/porn-star-jarod-steel
That’s SO frustrating. The only way I can see around it is to have tag names and slugs match each other during data entry. Then if you want to change the name later (when it’s not being used) that’s fine. But remember all the tags on the post will be affected if you make any changes.
Why? Because I’m an SEO… There’s value in topic pages. For now I’ll just have to suck it up and make the tag slug and name the same, but I really want the SEO value of having different slugs and names…
I’m still seeing problems with WordPress tags. I haven’t figured out when exactly it fucks up, but the tags with the more complex tag titles often get messed up…
In case anyone is interested… The problem turned out to be quotes in the tag name. Both single and double quotes in the “name” field will make the tag misbehave. When you save a post that previously had a tag assigned to it that had a single or double quote it will create a duplicate tag and assign the post to that tag.
If you type in ‘aces-bedroom’ and save the post it will be assigned to the correct tag. Then if you go back into the post and save it it will create a separate tag with a different slug which will look like this:
Slug: previews-from-aces-bedroom-acesbedroomcom
So the moral of the story is that if you want to use single or double quotes in your tag names, you need to live with whatever WordPress assigns as a slug. But be aware that if you modify the default slug value and then resave the post, the post will be reassigned to another tag with a different slug.
If you care about your slugs, then don’t use single or double quotes in your tag names.