Label Management in Confluence
Labels are a great way to help manage content, but tend to spiral out of control as anyone can add a new label to a page. This results in a large number of similar, or unneeded, labels, which clutter your system and make it harder to manage.
Why label management is important
Over time your system will collect more and more labels. Many of these will likely be legitimate labels used to help manager your knowledge base. Over time, however, you will start to collect typos, deprecated (un-needed) and duplicate labels.
Common examples include:
Plural vs Singular - “benefits” and “benefit”
Typos - “beneift” not “benefit”
Unneeded - “Excel” (but you no longer use or need this)
At best these labels clutter up the screen when selecting new labels - at worst users add them to documents which will confuse and break your search and other features.
A Solution
Setting up a regular label review (similar to a content review) will help you manage and update your labels. There are two macros that will help you
Labels List - Gives you all the labels in a specific space in alphabetical order
Popular Labels - Displays all labels in a specific space sized by use
Labels List
A-O
P-Z
0-9
This is useful for quickly seeing how many labels there are, and if there are any potential duplicates / un-needed labels. Click on the label to see a list of pages with that label.
Popular Labels
Generates either a list of labels or a heatmap. The list will display labels in descending order of use (most used at the top), while the heat-map displays them alphabetically and changes the size based on use (most used is bigger).