WordPress Categories point to other WordPress related blogs and not internal cat

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  sixfootstudio · Member · Jun 2, 2011 at 6:36 am

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  Hi,

  A client of mine seems to have gone the wordpress.com route with the option of their own domain name through wordpress.com

  All of his categories redirect to WordPress.com’s SIMILAR WordPress blogs instead of pointing to articles related to his categories internally.

  You can see this by going to http://bit.ly/k4PjT0. Once you have clicked on an article, click on a category at the bottom which then goes to WordPress.com’s related blogs.

  Is there a way to sort this out?

  Thanks,
  J

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  raincoaster · Member · Jun 2, 2011 at 8:11 am

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  Yep, that is how category links ON THE POSTs work on WordPress.com. Category links in the widget point only within the individual blog, though.

  http://en.support.wordpress.com/global-tags/

  You can work around this by choosing the iNove theme, which allows you to choose global or local categories, or by setting the Privacy settings to “visible to regular visitors but invisible to search engines.”

  For obvious reasons, using the iNove theme is what I’d recommend.

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  sixfootstudio · Member · Jun 2, 2011 at 7:44 pm

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  Hi Raincoaster,

  Thanks for getting back to me. I chose the option to block Search Engines and sure enough, the categories now link to internal articles as it should.

  Is this not a major design fault on the part of WordPress.com? It makes no sense at all to point to a search result of related blogs when you have clicked on a category within your own blog. Especially if the client has bought their own domain name through WordPress.com, their blog should behave like a WP blog from WordPress.org loaded onto your own domain.

  And to have to choose a theme the client might not like also seems crazy?

  Thanks again,
  James

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  raincoaster · Member · Jun 2, 2011 at 11:10 pm

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  It’s not a flaw. It’s deliberate.

  I’m not staff, but this is how I see it: every blog that uses any tag counts as one link to the Global Tag Pages. Millions of blogs are linking to the News page every day, for example. That makes WP.com hugely important in Google’s eyes.

  It used to work the other way, too, in that links FROM those hugely important pages counted as a real link to your blog, giving WP.com an SEO boost like nothing else on Earth. Last year they made the links from the global pages to the blogs NoFollow links, so they killed that stone dead.

  My hits fell by three quarters.

  So I’m no fan of the way it currently works, but I don’t think WP.com has any incentive to change it.

  As for buying a domain, you should know it’s only a URL, not a whole different blog. If they want a blog that functions like a WP.org one, they need to get hosting, install the software, export their blog here to over there.

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  sixfootstudio · Member · Jun 3, 2011 at 5:43 am

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  Thanks Raincoaster,

  I guess from WP.com’s perspective on SEO it does make a lot of sense so I have advised the client that if they want to have their cats link internally, they should move and set up their own domain.

  Thanks once again for your insight, I appreciate it!

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  raincoaster · Member · Jun 3, 2011 at 8:26 am

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  You’re welcome. I think that’s the best solution, unless you’re a CSS editing wiz and the iNove theme looks like something you could work with easily.

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  auxclass · Member · Jun 3, 2011 at 1:41 pm

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  Some sites get a significant amount of traffic from the interconnected tags and thus many people like them – I get maybe one or two page views a week on the global tags thing so does not make much difference to my traffic.