I have far too many categories for this blog and I want to consolidate a number of them, remove others. I started doing this a while ago and wound up changing the publication dates for a number of old posts which started appearing as most recent posts. It was a mess.
Is there a way to safely consolidate categories, delete unused ones and not make a complete mess of the site?
You should be able to update a post but leave the date as original publish date. I’m not sure about an automated way to do it though.
I stopped using categories a while ago and switch to only using tags. I was initially using both.
I’ve since heard from some of the SEO guys I know that having posts linked to multiple tags might not be the best route in terms of ranking, unless you don’t list the “tag pages” in your sitemap.