Categories in post linking to global categories
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Blog: http://mainedoenews.net
Theme: CoralineWhen privacy settings are “I would like my site to be visible to everyone,” the categories appearing at the bottom of posts link to global categories. This takes the user away from the site.
When privacy settings are “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” the categories link to site categories.
So, am I correct in understanding that if we want to have the site crawled by search engines, we have to lose traffic to the global WordPress.com, for which the categories are nearly irrelevant?
In other words, in order to appear on search engines, we would have to hide the categories?
Is there any way to change this behavior? This reduces significantly the value of hosting at WordPress.com.
I didn’t find forum topics about this issue, but I probably didn’t have the right search term. Has this been discussed before?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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The global tags pages are a big SEO jump for bloggers here since they have huge amounts of search engine ranking, and we all share in that ranking. I know a lot of bloggers that get a fair amount of traffic off the global tags pages.
1. Switch to the iNove theme where under theme options you can hide the categories and tags in the posts.
2. If you have CSS experience, get the CSS upgrade and hide the tags and categories, but do know that sometimes they cannot be hidden by themselves since they are under the same selector as the other meta data such as author, date, and perhaps even the “leave a comment” link, which means if you hide one, you hide them all.
This has been the behavior of the tags and cats in the post area basically forever, and it is not likely to change since wordpress itself gets a huge boost as well.
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If you could start two identical blogs, one here and one self-hosted, with identical content, tags and categories, the blog hosted here would always outrank the self-hosted blog and be listed above it in search results because of the exposure on the global tags pages and the boost the .COM blog would get from sharing in the search engine ranking of the global tags pages.
If you do not care about that, and some do not, I’ve offered a couple options.
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Thank you, thesacredpath.
I do know there are many SEO benefits to the global categories and tags.
My only point was that there appear to be no options for deactivating that linkage if desired. Just as we can customize CSS and domain names, perhaps that could be an upgrade option, too.
In any case, I will hide the post category links via CSS. Too bad to lose that additional opportunity for users to navigate to related content.
-Jay
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It would be nice if we had the option, but I remember a thread a couple years ago where staff basically said, “it ain’t going to happen.” It might have actually been Matt that said it. There are too many benefits for wordpress.com in having all our posts show up on the global tags pages.
They do actually give us a way to do this, but it is less than desirable. We can set our blogs to block search engines at settings > privacy.
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The way I see it is that this is a multi-user blogging platform and my blogs benefit from being a part of the wordpress.com blogging community. I had a personal blog being free hosted which had a substantial flow of traffic (1,000 – 1, 500 daily page views) and I moved to self hosting. That blog never recovered the traffic loss it experienced by being moved to self hosting. It was moved back onto wordpress.com self hosting a month ago and the traffic to it is already increasing. Hopefully, one day it will be back up to the same level it was before I moved it to self-hosting.
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If success is defined by the number of page views, I can see why a blog would benefit from the global traffic.
If the goal is to serve narrowly-targeted users … the traffic that arrives via specific cross-media messaging — e-mail campaigns, print pieces, in-person collaboration — then global categories may be less significant. We have slightly different goals, that’s all.
For me, wordpress.com is a world-class site hosting platform as well as a blogging service.
Site: Maine Department of Education <http://mainedoenews.net/>
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