Wordpress and the “Read More” Problem
Chris of Rillz Magazine wrote an interesting post on a Wordpress quirk that isn’t doing anything for your SEO. The ever helpful Wordpress uses the phrase “Read more” or “Continue reading” automatically at the end of post excerpts. This is useful since you want your readers to know that they have something more to read and that the post hasn’t ended. However, as Chris pointed out, in terms of SEO this is actually not a good thing because you want search engines to only rank relevant links. Links with generic terms in the anchor text does you no good in terms of SEO, and in fact will somehow show that your Wordpress blog is very much about “read” and “reading” due to the number of internal links containing these words as anchor text.
To combat this problem Chris suggests that you simply use to nofollow link attribute. You can read more about the nofollow attribute and its uses in our recent DoubleSpark SEO blog entries entitled “Reintroducing the NOFOLLOW Attribute” and “What NOFOLLOW Means for Your SEO Campaign”.
Another way to combat this problem is by doing what we do here at PhoenixRealm, adding the post title so that relevant keywords can be found on the anchor text.
Thanks to Chris for the heads up on this Wordpress issue. If you have any post ideas feel free to contact us.
Today is May 13, 2008
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[…] been reading through some interesting posts on SEO as of late. The latest one fixates on how Wordpress displays the “read more” link. […]
hi There,
A nice article, but in either case linking to the article as read more will not create big issues so I don’t believe that would deserve too much attention but whoever feels like can simply remove the read more and leave the empty [..] or use the title’s anchor text.