Stuffing your video with irrelevant tags will get your video penalized by YouTube’s algorithm.

Clean up the junk tags and improve your ranking!

In this post we explain how you can quickly and easily remove irrelevant video tags with TunePocket’s Tag Inspector tool.

TL;DR

Improve ranking and discoverability of your YouTube videos by removing irrelevant, generic, and redundant tags.

Why Junk Tags Hurt your video ranking

Using every possible keyword you can think of won’t help your videos get discovered!

YouTube’s Help explains that using misleading or unrelated tags may lead to video removal under misleading metadata policies.

Why you shouldn’t stuff your videos with unrelated keywords:

• It dilutes search signals, making it harder for YouTube to understand the video.
• It wastes limited tag real estate with generic or off-topic phrases.
• It increases redundancy with multiple tags that say the same thing.

Don’t let YouTube treat your videos as spam. Clean up that junk metadata!

Before your start your first video tags audit

Before auditing your tags, finalize your video title and the description.

If applicable, define 2–3 intent modifiers you actually target (e.g., study, tutorial, remix).

Better video metadata improves tag scoring later.

Need help writing better video titles?

Try TunePocket YouTube Title Generator

5 Step Tag Audit Workflow (5 minutes)

• Step 1: Extract

  Use YouTube Video Tags Extractor & Inspector to pull the current tags and compute their Relevance Scores.

• Step 2: Prune

  Remove tags below your threshold (e.g., <60/100) unless they capture a critical nuance.

• Step 3: Redundancy Sweep

  Collapse near-duplicates; keep the highest-scoring form.

• Step 4: Must-Have Core

  Lock 5–8 tags that best describe the video (top head terms + top intent tags).

• Step 5: Variants & Misspellings

  Include only 1–2 for tricky head terms. Avoid bloat.

Rules for Deleting “Junk”

Delete tags that fall into these categories:

• Don’t align with your video’s title / description.
• Generic one-word catch all’s (like music, video) unless absolutely central.
• Overlong: rambling phrases longer than 5–6 words.
• Redundant: alternate wording that adds no new intent.
• Off-language or off-region when not applicable to your audience.
• Typos beyond the allowed cap (more than 1–2 per head term).

How to handle similar tags

If two tags are similar, how to decide which one to keep?

• Keep exactly one canonical form (e.g., lofi beats vs lo-fi beats).
• Choose the version that matches your title / description wording and has the higher score.
• Merge singular / plural if they serve the same intent.
• Misspellings: cap at 1–2 per main head term only if the set stays concise.

Keep the “Must-Have” tags

Aim to have 8-10 tags:

• 2 core head terms (strongest fit for the main topic).
• 2–3 high-scoring intent modifiers (study, tutorial, beginners).
• 1–2 tightly aligned specific phrases like “3 hour study mix”.
• 0–1 misspelling / variant (only for tricky head to spell terms).

Shorts vs Long-Form

Shorts: Bias toward concise head + one clear intent tag. Use fewer tags.

Long-form: Allow more intent coverage (study, sleep, tutorial), but keep the set lean.

Clean up junk tags now

Run a tag audit now with YouTube Video Tags Extractor (make sure to enable the Relevance Score box) to streamline your keywords.

Important Disclaimer

Cleaning up junk tags improves topical clarity and helps YouTube better understand your video. However, this step alone does not guarantee higher rankings or more views. YouTube’s search and recommendation system considers many signals, including watch time, click-through rate, audience retention, viewer satisfaction surveys, and overall channel authority. Treat tag cleanup as one part of a broader optimization workflow that also includes strong titles, engaging thumbnails, clear descriptions, consistent publishing, and audience engagement.

Questions?

We hope you find our tutorial helpful.

Have another urgent question about YouTube? Post it in the comments and we’ll do the research.