Can I use Internal Tags to make hidden tags to help search?

Using Ghost
1

Hello, I want to add “additional tags” to some of my content. However, I don’t want to add more tag categories, as I want to keep the main structure fairly simple. At present, I use one (mostly) or two tags for most posts. I restrict myself because I don’t want to create too many public-facing tags that make it feel disorganised and hard to navigate. I suppose I want to be able to add additional tags similar to keywords so that when people search within my website, the additional tags will help filter and narrow the search. However, I don’t want the public to see the additional tags in my all-tags folder/page.

I am genuinely not looking to do this from an SEO point of view, although if it helps with SEO, that’s great. If my content keeps growing at its current pace, I will end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of posts. So, a good search is everything to me. I like Ghost because the search function seems to work so well. But I want to be able to add more tags (aka keywords) to my posts which are not public. But the words, in most cases, will appear in the document text anyway.

I suppose what I want to know, or what I need confirmed, is: if I add internal tags using the hash, are those tags searchable like keywords from the public-facing side? I want it to be searchable like keywords.

Thank you.
Ryan

2

This should work! It’s also pretty easy to test out. Just add an internal tag to your post and run a search. Let us know if it works for you.

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3

I tried it before, so I thought I would ask the group here as I felt they would have far more experience than me. Anyway, I tried to do a test just now a bit more thoroughly. The result is a big NO. If you use internal tags, it doesn’t act like a keyword - not as far as I could see.

However, it did prove to me that if the keyword was somewhere in the document, the search was excellent at finding it. So, I have decided to create a pretty table at the bottom of most posts with keywords. It is just for my users. I hope there isn’t any Google penalty for this, as I won’t be stuffing it with keywords. So, as an example, if the post is about a formula, I may add the keyword “formula” once at the bottom so that users searching for it can find it quickly.

Thoughts and advice are welcome. Thank you.

Btw, I did come across another search-related issue, but I’ll start a separate thread for that.

4

Ah, good catch. That makes sense. I had the same tag as internal and public, which threw me off.

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