In this post i will show you how to modify the default Wordpress data archives, in order to achieve a better SEO, usability and unclutter your blog.
photo credit: Chris (archi3d)
You can see on the internet that a lot of blogs (above all the newest ones) show in the sidebar a list that represents a calendar view of the posts, so that they can be used to view the history of the blog activity.
Are you sure that this defaul functionality is really needed?
Don’t you think it causes more disadvantages than advantages?
Let’s list a few reasons why you should remove the date based taxonomy:
- To avoid content duplication: the default Wordpress blog installation shows each post created in 5 different places: in the category archive, in the tag archive, data archive, in the frontpage and in the post page. That’s bad for your SEO.
- To improve the blog readibility: let the visitor focus on your content, unclutter your sidebar/footer and let him/her enjoy the content you provide.
- You already have tags and category archives: 2 taxonomies are enough.
- It isn’t useful to the visitor: do you think the guest is interested in what you wrote in 2005? He came to find the answer to his problem.
- Because the data archive can be useful only to news sites or sites that write articles whose date is a relevant part of the content.
What we’ll now is drop the date structure from the sidebar, replacing it with a “Date Archives” page that list the monthly archives in a single page, and shows only the post permalinks - not the post content or the excerpt.
We’ll achieve this result using a great plugin: Clean Archives.
Installation
Download the plugin from the web page http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/projects/clean-archives/
Now unarchive the file clean_archives.zip and upload the folder srg_clean_archives/ on the Web server, in the directory wordpress/wp-content/plugins.
Login to the Wordpress administration panel, open the Plugins panel and activate SRG Clean Archives.
Create a page called “Date Archives”. Put in the content of this page (using Code mode, not Visual mode)
<!–srg_clean_archives–>
Publish it and you’ll have all the archives in a single page.
Now drop the old archives from your sidebar.php file (or wherever you have your date archives) - just find the code that launches the php function
<?php wp_list_pages(’title_li=<h5>pages</h5>’ ); ?>
and delete it.
Configuration
In the Wordpress administration panel, open the Plugins panel and click the SRG Clean Archives tab. Here you can find some configuration options: you can set whether you want to show the monthly post count, the number of comments of each post, you can set if you want to use graphical effects using moo.fx and if you want to show a link to the default detailed monthly archive.
You can also get rid of the data archives using the Robots Meta plugin. This way if someone types in the browser the old data archives URL, he will be 301 redirected to the blog frontpage.
Tags: CMS, Wordpress
August 24th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
4mGood idea.8n I compleatly disagree with last post . ttr
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