Question:
In simple words (for a WordPress website), what are taxonomies?

Perplexity.ai:
In WordPress, taxonomies are a way to group and organize content so people can find it more easily. The two most common taxonomies are Categories and Tags.

For a public website, a simple way to explain it is:

• Categories = broad topic groups, like “Being Human”, “Inquiry”, or “Peace”.
• Tags = smaller labels that describe details, like “unhappiness”, “suffering”, or “mind-stuff”.

So, a taxonomy is basically a website’s filing system. It helps visitors browse related content instead of seeing everything mixed together.

Question: I want to better understand Categories and Tags in WordPress; overusing them seems to affect SEO?

I enjoy sharing nondual related posts, with content generated by notebooklm.google.com (infographics, slides, mind maps).

What are basic categories and tags that might be relevant for me?

In categories I like the tree-structure, i.e. People/John Sherman… In this case would I assign the People category and the John Sherman category to a specific post?

I saw plugins to nest Tags as well.

What are your recommendations, ideas?

Claude.ai:

Great questions. Let me untangle a few things here, because the Categories vs. Tags distinction trips up a lot of WordPress users, and the SEO concern is real but often misunderstood.

The core distinction

Categories are the table of contents of your site — broad, hierarchical, few. Every post needs at least one.

Tags are the index in the back of a book — specific, flat, many. Optional.

The classic rule: if you only had 5–10 sections in a bookstore, what would they be? Those are your categories. Everything else — author names, specific concepts, recurring themes — is a tag.

The SEO concern, honestly

The “overusing hurts SEO” warning is real but specific. The problem isn’t having lots of categories and tags — it’s that WordPress automatically generates an archive page for every single one (/category/people/, /tag/john-sherman/, etc.). If you have 200 tags each used once, you’ve created 200 thin, near-duplicate archive pages that Google sees as low-quality.

Three practical fixes:

1. Only create a tag if you’ll use it 3+ times. A tag used once is just clutter.
2. Use an SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress) to noindex tag archives — or category archives, or both. This tells Google “don’t index these listing pages, just the posts themselves.” Many serious bloggers noindex tag archives by default.
3. Don’t duplicate the same term as both a category and a tag. Pick one.

Your People/John Sherman question

Yes — with hierarchical categories, you assign only the child (John Sherman). WordPress automatically understands that John Sherman lives under People. Assigning both is redundant and can cause duplicate-content issues on archive pages.

The post will still appear on the /category/people/ archive because of the hierarchy.

Nested tags

I’d skip this. Plugins exist (like Taxonomy Terms Order or various custom taxonomy plugins), but nested tags defeat the purpose of tags — which is to be a flat, flexible, many-to-many labeling system. If you find yourself wanting hierarchy in a label, that label probably wants to be a category, or a custom taxonomy.

A better pattern if you outgrow the category/tag binary: custom taxonomies. For a nondual site you could imagine separate taxonomies for Teacher, Tradition, and Practice — each with their own hierarchy if needed. Plugins like Custom Post Type UI make this easy. But honestly, start with just categories and tags; only reach for custom taxonomies if you hit a real wall.

A starter structure for nondual content

Categories (hierarchical, broad — pick a post’s primary “home”):

• Teachers → John Sherman, Rupert Spira, Adyashanti, Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi…
• Traditions → Advaita Vedanta, Dzogchen, Zen, Direct Path…
• Format → Infographics, Slides, Mind Maps (since your content is NotebookLM-generated, this might be useful for readers who prefer one format)
• Themes → Self-Inquiry, Awareness, Awakening, Suffering…

Tags (flat, specific, reusable across categories):

Things like pointing-out instruction, no-self, witness consciousness, seeking, enlightenment myths, headlessness, NotebookLM (if you want to flag your generation method) — concepts that cut across teachers and traditions.

So a post summarizing a John Sherman talk on self-inquiry might get:

• Categories: John Sherman, Self-Inquiry (or just John Sherman if Self-Inquiry feels more like a tag to you)
• Tags: who am I, fear, direct looking

My practical recommendation

Start lean. Maybe 4–6 top-level categories with room for nested teacher names. Add tags only when you notice yourself wanting to group three or more posts by a concept. Install Yoast or Rank Math and noindex your tag archives from day one — you get the organizational benefit without the SEO downside.

You can always restructure later; WordPress makes bulk re-categorization easy.

Want me to sketch out a more complete category tree based on the specific teachers or traditions you focus on?