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Sphinn Home » Social Media
Remove The Category Base From Wordpress
Social Media News Source: http://www.themadhat.com
Published: Nov 02, 2008 - 01:58 pm
Story Found By: NickWilsdon 1198 Days ago
Category: Social Media
Essential SEO fix for WordPress, it will increase internal PR/linkjuice on category pages and reduce URL length. Aaron Chronister (aka TheMadHat) finally brings us a hack to solve this problem. P.S. pressure him for a plugin in the comments.
 Comments8 Comments  

Comments

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from NickWilsdon 1197 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Just made these changes on my blog. Works great but yes, a plugin would be very handy Aaron. With WPAU and one-click plugin upgrades I’m getting really lazy ;)

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from JohnHGohde 1196 Days ago #
Votes: -1

Well, I wouldn’t advise doing that at all.  For one thing, the “category/” text from your WordPress URL string allows you to manage or exclude ALL your categories from being indexed with a robots.txt file.If there ever was a problem, I solved it simply by creating the “category/” page.  Of course, I also managed to put it to good use.  Did the same thing with "tag/" too.Of course, if you prefer to have no URL structure at all and not be able to tell a page from a post, from a category, from a tag; simply by looking at the URL feel free to carry on.

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from NickWilsdon 1196 Days ago #
Votes: 1

@JohnWell yes, this would would make it harder to block category pages. I guess it all comes down to whether or not you want your category pages ranked. If you do - this fix will help. As for me, I block the tag pages but leave the category pages in the index.

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from JohnHGohde 1196 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I am indexing both.My SEO blog is displaying a description for each of my tag pages, as well as a meta description tag for them by way of my theme’s functions.php template.  For each post listed on a tag page, I am displaying the post meta description that was created thanks to the All In One SEO plugin.  The only hassle is that I have to add a meta description for each post, otherwise it would show up blank on the tag pages. Thus, the tag pages are showing neither the excerpt nor a snippet, but rather the post description.  I theorize that this should make the tag pages unique.I was a bit late in adding the meta descriptions to the tag pages.  So, it is going to take a while for Google to catch up with the change.I will eventually be posting on how I did all of the above.

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from NickWilsdon 1196 Days ago #
Votes: 0

What you’ve done with tag pages sounds interesting John - will look out for the post. I’m always interested in WP optimisation due to the number of blogs we run now on that platform. I’ve had some good results for category pages already so the prospect of loosing a surplus level and hopefully increasing the linkjuice or PR value is appealing. I’m up for giving it a try anyway. Will let you know how it goes.

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from GlobalFusion 1196 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Nick,I was checking your blog and found out that the regular URL paths for categories still have the old format, i.e. //nickwilsdon.com/category/search-conferences/. With this plugin it should be //nickwilsdon.com/search-conferences/. I remove the http: for delinking purposes.Any ideas?Augusto

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from sammy 1196 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I personnaly like the category section and keep at least a "cat" on the url for users and a proper title tag, like archive for x category, As I think categories can be a nice way to browse through your archives for users. For the tag section, I really don’t think that you need to nofollow them as they are microformat and well understand as tag by machines, they shouldn’t put weight on those page but use them as semantic way to understand your site.

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from NickWilsdon 1196 Days ago #
Votes: 1

@GlobalFusionThat’s odd - I could have sworn that was working yesterday. Looks like an issue with the .htaccess rule. It’s a bit late tonight but I’ll have another go at this tomorrow and report back.

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