January 6 Lives Under Four Labels on My Own Site

I ran a count on my own site this morning and did not love what came back.

January 6 is the subject this site is best known for. It is one of the top things people type into the search box here. And on my own database it lives under four different category labels.

January 6. J6. J6 Case Files. J6 Evidence Nexus.

Forty-seven published posts, split four ways.

Published posts per category label, January 6 subject

Source: Published post counts by category, realryannichols.com database, pulled 2026-10-16 ↗

That is not a disaster. It is drift. And drift is the most common way a business quietly loses track of its own work.

How a label splits

Nobody sits down and decides to file one subject four ways.

It happens one post at a time. Someone is in a hurry. "January 6" feels long, so they type "J6." A new series starts and gets its own name. Every single choice made sense in the moment. Nobody ever went back and lined them up.

Multiply that by a few years and you get what I found today. My site has 67 category names across 645 published posts. Twenty-seven of those names have been used exactly once.

Motivation is worse than January 6. Nine labels. Motivation. Motivation & Resilience. Motivation & Discipline. Faith & Motivation. And five more like them.

Some of those splits may be on purpose. A case file is not a news story, and it is fair to keep them apart. But a reader cannot tell which splits were decisions and which were accidents. Neither can a search engine. Neither, a year from now, can I.

Why this costs you money

This is not a neat-freak problem. It is a findability problem, and findability is the whole reason you own a platform instead of renting one.

When your work is split across labels:

• A visitor who clicks one label sees a fraction of what you have.
• Your best subject looks thinner than it is.
• Any report you run by category is wrong without anybody noticing.
• Every automated tool you point at the archive inherits the mess.

That last one is where it bit me. This site publishes on a schedule through automation I built. A machine will happily invent a fiftieth category name if nobody tells it not to.

That rule did not come from a book. It came from watching the count climb.

The fix is a short list, written down

Librarians solved this a long time ago. They call it a controlled vocabulary: a fixed list of approved terms, and nothing goes in that is not on the list.

You do not need a library degree to use it. Here is the version I would put in any small business system I build:

1. Write the list. Five to ten categories. Each one gets a single sentence that says what belongs there.
2. Make the system enforce it. A dropdown, not a free text box. People and machines both type whatever is fastest.
3. New names need a decision. If something truly does not fit, that is a conversation, not a keystroke.
4. Run the count every few months. Any label with one post is a question you need to answer.
5. Merge on purpose. When you fold two labels into one, move the old posts and point the old address at the new one so nothing breaks.

This applies far past blog posts. Job types in a CRM. Product tags in a store. Lead sources on a form. Every one of those drifts the same way, and every one of them makes your reports lie to you a little more each month.

I am not going to pretend my archive is clean today. It is not. The count was 50 names back in August. It is 67 today. Not everything on this site comes through the same pipe, and a rule only binds the system you actually wire it into. That is the lesson I am still paying for: the list has to live in every door, not just the one you built last.

If your own records are split across labels you did not choose, that cleanup is part of the work I do.