How to Manage Terms in the SharePoint Term Store: A Complete Guide
If you’ve ever watched metadata sprawl turn a SharePoint environment into a tagging free-for-all, you already understand why the term store matters. It’s the backbone of structured, reusable metadata across your sites — and once you get comfortable with it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
This guide walks you through everything you need to know about managing terms: adding them, reorganizing them, reusing them intelligently, and keeping the whole taxonomy healthy over time.
Quick Orientation: How the Term Store Is Structured
Before diving into the how-to, it helps to know what you’re working with. The term store is organized into three levels:
- Term group — a container for related term sets (e.g., Employee)
- Term set — a collection of related terms (e.g., Business Unit)
- Term — a reusable word or phrase with a unique ID and multilingual label support
There are also two flavors of terms to be aware of:
- Managed terms live inside term sets and are used for structured, consistent metadata.
- Enterprise keywords are ad-hoc tags that users apply directly — useful, but less controlled.
This guide focuses on managed terms, where most of the governance work happens.
Before You Start
You’ll need SharePoint admin permissions, or at minimum, permission to manage terms in the term store. From there, head to SharePoint admin center → Content services → Term store.
Adding Terms to a Term Set
The examples here use an Employee term group with several term sets: Business Unit, Horizontal Tag, Skill, Relevant Experience, Total Experience, and Band.
To add a term:
- In the tree-view pane, expand the Employee term group.
- Select the term set you want to add to (e.g., Business Unit).
- Select Add term, type the name, and press Enter.
Once you’re in a rhythm, populating your term sets goes quickly. Here’s a sample of what a fully populated Employee group might look like:
| Term Set | Terms |
|---|---|
| Business Unit | BFSI, ECM, MARKETING, SALES, LEGAL |
| Horizontal Tag | MAS, DIGITAL, INSURANCE, FINANCE |
| Skill | SHAREPOINT, OFFICE 365, WINDOWS, DATABASE, STORAGE, NETWORKING, AZURE |
| Relevant Experience | 0–3, 3–6, 6–9, 9–12 |
| Total Experience | 0–3, 3–6, 6–9, 9–12 |
| Band | A, B, C, D |
When you select any term, the right pane opens with a command bar and four configuration tabs: General, Usage settings, Navigation, and Advanced. More on those shortly.
Building Hierarchies with Child Terms
Terms aren’t limited to a flat list — you can nest them to model real organizational structures. For example, the Band term set might need sub-levels under each band:
- Expand the Band term set and select term A.
- Select Add term and create A1, A2, and A3 underneath it.
- Repeat for B, C, and D.
This pattern works just as well for product lines, department hierarchies, or any other nested classification you need.
Renaming a Term
Renaming doesn’t just change the display label — it also lets you update the description and manage synonyms, all without touching the term’s underlying ID. That means existing content tagged with the term stays intact.
- Select the term (e.g., BFSI under Business Unit).
- Select Rename term from the command bar or the … menu.
- In the Edit translation and synonyms window, update the Translation, Description, and/or Synonyms fields.
- Save your changes.
Copying a Term
There are two copy options, and it’s worth knowing the difference.
Copy term duplicates only the selected term — children are not included. It’s the right choice when you want a standalone copy of a term to use elsewhere.
Copy term with children duplicates the full branch, including all nested child terms. Use this when you need to replicate an entire section of your taxonomy in a different location.
In both cases, the copy appears in the same term set with a – Copy suffix, which you can rename right away.
Moving a Term
If a term ends up in the wrong place, moving it is straightforward:
- Select the term and choose Move term.
- In the Move to dialog, pick the destination: a term set, a term, or a child term.
- Confirm the move.
The term disappears from its original location and reappears at the destination — along with its children, if it has any.
Deleting a Term
Deletion is permanent, so read the warning carefully before confirming. A few things to know:
- Child terms are deleted along with the parent.
- If the term you’re deleting was reused in other term sets, those reused instances move to Orphaned Terms under the System term group rather than disappearing entirely.
If you’re uncertain whether content still relies on the term, deprecating it (covered below) is usually the safer move.
Pinning a Term
Pinning lets you surface a term in multiple locations while keeping a single source of truth. The key characteristic: pinned terms are read-only everywhere except the original source.
- Select the source term and choose Pin term.
- In the Pin term to panel, select the destination term set or term.
- Confirm.
Any edits you make to the term at its source are automatically reflected in all pinned instances. This is ideal when you want consistent reference data shared across term groups without risking divergence.
Reusing a Term
Reuse is similar to pinning, but with an important distinction: reused terms are two-way synced. You can edit the term from any location where it’s been reused, and the change propagates everywhere.
Say term A has children A1, A2, A3, each with their own child terms (A1.1, A2.1, A3.1). When you reuse A, the entire hierarchy comes along for the ride.
What doesn’t happen automatically: if you later add a new child A4 under A, that new term isn’t automatically reused wherever A appears. You’ll need to reuse A4 explicitly.
And like deletion, if you delete the source term, the reused instances are moved to Orphaned Terms — they don’t simply vanish.
Merging Terms
Got duplicate or near-duplicate terms cluttering your taxonomy? Merge them.
For example, to merge D (from the Band term set) into ECM (from Business Unit):
- Select the source term D and choose Merge term.
- In the Merge to panel, select ECM as the destination.
- Confirm the merge.
After the merge, ECM remains as the canonical term, and D appears as a synonym. Content previously tagged with D continues to resolve correctly — no retagging required.
Deprecating a Term
When a term has outlived its usefulness but you can’t safely delete it (because content already uses it), deprecation is your best option. A deprecated term:
- Is hidden from the tagging picker, so no new content gets tagged with it
- Remains visible in the term store so you can still manage it
- Can be re-enabled at any time if needed
To deprecate, select the term and choose Deprecate term. The term’s status icon updates to reflect the change, and that’s it — clean, reversible, and non-destructive.
Configuring Term Tabs
Each term has four tabs that control how it behaves across your environment.
General
Manage multilingual labels, descriptions, and synonyms here. If your organization operates in multiple languages, this is where you maintain the translated labels for each locale.
Usage Settings
This tab is your control panel for term behavior:
- Available for tagging — toggle whether users can apply this term to content.
- Unique identifier — the term’s GUID, useful for automation and API integrations.
- Sort order — controls how child terms are ordered.
- Member of — shows everywhere the term appears (source, reused, pinned) and which term sets it belongs to.
Navigation
If you’re using metadata-driven navigation, this tab is where you configure it. For a term like ECM, you can set up:
- Navigation node title and hover text — what appears in the menu.
- Navigation node type — either a simple link or a term-driven URL (e.g.,
/ECM) that SharePoint generates automatically. - Visibility — whether the node shows up in global navigation, current navigation, or both.
- Target pages — the page that opens when a user selects the term in navigation (e.g.,
ECM.aspx), with a separate target for child terms. - Associated folder — the Site Pages library folder linked to this term.
- Catalog item pages — for cross-site publishing and catalog scenarios.
- Category image — an image to associate with this term in navigation.
Advanced
Use this tab for custom properties — essentially key/value pairs you can attach to a term:
- Shared custom properties are available on all reused and pinned instances of the term.
- Local custom properties apply only to this term in the current term set.
Examples: Owner = HR, CostCenter = 1001. These can power integrations, Power Automate flows, or custom reporting.
The System Term Group
You’ll notice a System term group in your term store that you didn’t create. SharePoint puts it there automatically. It contains three term sets:
- Hashtags — stores tags from newsfeeds and discussions.
- Keywords — stores enterprise keyword tags applied to documents and pages.
- Orphaned Terms — the holding area for terms that lost their parent location (e.g., when a term set was deleted or a reused term’s source was removed).
You generally won’t need to edit the System group, but it’s worth checking Orphaned Terms periodically during cleanup.
A Quick Note on the Content Type Gallery
The Content type gallery (found under SharePoint admin center → Content services → Content type gallery) is where you manage tenant-level content types — the templates that define what fields and metadata get attached to documents and list items.
It shows you all content types with their parent, category, and last published date. You’ll use it alongside the term store to make sure your metadata columns are connected to the right managed metadata fields.
The two features are complementary: the term store defines what values are available, and the content type gallery defines where those values get used.
Wrapping Up
The term store rewards a little upfront planning. Getting your term groups, term sets, and hierarchies right early on makes governance much easier down the road — and features like reuse, pinning, and deprecation give you the flexibility to adapt the taxonomy as your organization changes without breaking what’s already been tagged.
If you’re building out a new SharePoint environment or inheriting a messy one, start with the term store. Everything else will be cleaner for it.
