Stopping Wordpress Using Category Descriptions As Link Titles – Affiliate Quick Tips
Quick Tips Add commentsA while back I shared how I’d discovered you could create descriptions for categories, thereby giving those often useful resources a chance at ranking.
Having FINALLY gotten around to getting some content created for the categories on the website I intend to use this handy dandy little tip on, I was moderately horrified to discover that Wordpress will use these descriptions as link titles (well my theme does anyway). That sort of volume of text showing up when someone hovers over one of your links is very unappealing as is the thought of how Google may react to 3,000+ words of text on every page of the site that isn’t always visible and is the same on each page!
So, if you decide to create nice unique content on your category page and don’t want mahoosive chunks of text flying all over your site, here’s how to fix it!
Just A Simple Edit…
One file controls all this hoo ha, and you’ll find it in: WP-Includes > category-template.php
Simply open this file and do a search for the following text snippet: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 1
Change the 1 to a 0 thusly: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 0
Save your changes.
And the pesky link titles should be gone!
That’s A Fascinating Looking File…
And I’m pretty sure it’ll do lots of cool things which I will investigate and report back upon in due course. However, I might just leave it alone for now as I can do without accidently turning my site upside down, inside out, and back to front without knowing how or why I’ve blinking well done it in the run up to Christmas!!
Oh, and do take a back up of that little file before you change it, just in case you have an accident. I’m way too good at editing the original file and accidently deleting a single (but crucial) character somewhere along the way whereupon our neighbours hear something close to the following: -
“Arrghhh, ohhhh, Noooooo!!!! F**K!!”
Then the line my long suffering and lovely husband is all too familiar with;
“Duncan! This f**king Wordpress has f**cking well stuffed up the site again. Get it Fixed!!”
“What were you doing right before this happened, my love?” He will say, mild mannered as always.
“Oooh… Arrghhhh, I dunno! Fix the chuffing thing, quick!”
*Ahem* so yeah, I hope you guys find this tip useful! Particularly the bit about backing up your files first. You don’t all have Duncan sitting in your office to swear at and make it all nice and functional for you again should you make a small error 
November 11th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
That sort of thing always happens to me. Since I am new to all this, I often find myself wanting to tinker with the css.
Its a pain when you only want to make small changes, and accidently delete a div. You refresh the design and the page has now gone all sque wiff.
And it really is a soul destroying trying to find where to put the back in, unless you have a back up you can refer to.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Any idea how to show a meta description for the category pages? Usually it uses the category description, but with this now being used for the category title I would like to use a unique one to increase clickthroughs.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:40 am
I’ve no idea how well it works Tim, but I did find this plugin: – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-category-meta/
November 12th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Oh and Stuart, I feel your pain!
February 3rd, 2010 at 5:20 am
arse! I use the extended categories widget, which messes with ‘use_desc_for_title’ as setting to ‘0′ has no effect. If only I was any use at php