A Simple SEO Tip – Don't let your Archive's Internal Links Steal your Link Juice

Every blogger in the world (even the Internet marketers) seems to like having archive widgets in the sidebar or the footer. I'm talking about the date, category and tag archives (the tag cloud). What I recently discovered is that as those lists grow, they leech more and more ranking factors from the posts or pages where the ranking factors should be increasing. In other words, the pages and posts of importance are losing their juice to archive pages that don't mean very much, for SEO or usability.

Fix the Problem the Right Way

This only matters if you care about your rankings, of course. A person running a purely personal blog, for example, is only going to be concerned about usability and couldn't care less about ranking factors. For everyone else, though, there is a right way and a wrong way to fix the problem.

The wrong way is to leave the archive widgets in place and somehow insert the "rel='nofollow'" attribute. As Google has plainly stated in many different web locations, they count against the flow because the links without that attribute do not absorb the missing juice (unlike the behavior of a couple of years ago).

Another wrong way is to use meta tags to tell the search engines to not index or follow those archive pages. Again, they still rob you of the link juice.

My Fix

I've been studying the "in-page analytics" provided by Google Analytics. I can tell you that people rarely click on archive links. They are much more likely to use a search widget before resorting to that tactic.

What I did was create a new page (it's in the navigation bar at the top) called "Archives". I included a post by post listing, a category drop down box and a tag drop down box. With modifications, a custom taxonomy drop down box could be created — I don't use them, so I can't tell you how.

To make life a little easier, I copied my page template to a "page-archives.php" file and changed the template name in the comment section at the top of the template. I then edited the page to point to that template instead of the default template for pages. Now, before I tell you what I did to the templates, I have to tell you which plugins I'm using; there are only two: Clean Archives Reloaded and Tag Dropdown Widget. The categories drop down list can be created in PHP separately (I'll show you how).

After the section on the template that displays "the_content", I added these two pieces of code:

<h3>Categories</h3>
<?php wp_dropdown_categories('show_option_none=Select Category&orderby=name&show_count=1'); ?>
<script type="text/javascript"><!–
  var dropdown = document.getElementById("cat");
  function onCatChange() {
    if ( dropdown.options[dropdown.selectedIndex].value > 0 ) {
      location.href = "<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/?cat="+dropdown.options[dropdown.selectedIndex].value;
    }
  }
  dropdown.onchange = onCatChange;
–></script>

<h3>Tags</h3>
<?php if( function_exists( 'generateTagDropdown' ) ) {
  echo generateTagDropdown( 'orderby=name&count=on&hide_empty=1' );
}
?>

On my new archives page itself, I just went into the editor and added the tag that displays the Clean Archives Reloaded list.

Tweak It

Of course, the code I provided above will probably have to be tweaked to match your theme, especially the h3 tag sets. Please be aware that some of the lines that are split in the first piece of code shouldn't be, but if you copy and paste they won't be split, if that makes sense to you. In other words, you should be fine if you just copy and paste.

There are other plugins that provide the same functionality as those I used, but are presented differently. It's up to you how much effort you want to put into a single archives page. Again, I'll emphasize that very few people will click on category and tag archive links (except maybe those included in an actual post). I saw no evidence that people click on date archives at all.

I actually need to do some more tweaking. I have tags that are similar to each other when only one for that entire group is necessary. It's time consuming, so I'm not going to be changing things that often.

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