Greetings fans of affiliate quick tips! This week I have been mostly fiddling around trying to reduce duplicate content on my blogs (again). The reason i’ve been having to do this is that I have reorganised my increasingly out of control category structures on sites such as my new offering Blokes Undies. I created lovely sub categories to help organise my content better.
To prevent any unfortunate duplicate content issues I decided it would be better if my categories didn’t contain full post content. Instead of listing posts in full, there is now an excerpt and a list of post titles like this example here in my new hosiery department on Lingerie Brands.
How To Do This
In the file that controls your category, which will be called something like category.php or archive.php simply look for the following bit of code: -
<?php the_content(__(’Read more’));?>
Simply swap it for: -
<?php the_excerpt(__(’Read more’));?>
And you’re set!
I’m also experimenting with plugins that might give me an option to create thumbnails of images associated with individual posts and display them at the category level to make my new page structure more inviting to users.
If anyone has any clever excerpt related tricks, do please pop them in the comments field and help make this “quick tip” more useful!
March 2nd, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Cool stuff Kirsty. I’ve been bookmarking cool wordpress stuff recently to delicious, so you and your readers might find some of these interesting – http://delicious.com/petercolesdc/Wordpress
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:24 pm
You can also keep sub category posts from showing up in the parent completely by adding this little code after the start of loop.
if ((is_category()) && in_category($wp_query->get_queried_object_id())) {
Then you can use the parent category for a king of landing page/sub category directory.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 am
I bet you hated every minute putting that one together lol!
Where’s the thermal longjohns?!
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Many Thanks as always for your useful info.
I am far from a web developer, but after playing around with my wordpress theme code, I have got my category pages showing thumbnails of the relevant products as well as changing the date and time area to show a direct link to the retailer, hence giving me that extra little bit of exposure.
Enjoy your spiders!!
Tris
November 16th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Hi Kirsty,
Love the blog (been a reader for ages). Just wanted to point out to anyone using this snippet of code (which is awesome by the way) that when you copy it from your blog it copies the formatting from the quotation marks (around the Read More text) and will break your archive.php page. The way to fix this is to copy it from your blog to Notepad and then copy it into your archive.php page.
Best wishes,
James
November 19th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Thanks for that James!