More on multiple blog categories or labels

Several of my readers expressed interest when I blogged about the multiple categories/labels penalty, so I wanted to share some additional information with you.

According to my client, they've found that there are two ways choosing multiple categories can hurt you. The worst is when the search engines decide not to index your blog post at all. You can test that by searching for your post title, or a unique phrase in your post, in quotes. If the post doesn't show up in the results, the search engines aren't indexing it at all.

The other way that it can hurt you is more subtle: Essentially, choosing too many categories or labels can hurt your blog's PageRank, even if all of the pages are still indexed. When I learned that, I remembered a time when my blog's PageRank dropped suddenly and inexplicably. While I can't remember if the drop coincided with when I started using labels, I'm going to play it safe from here on out!