SEO: How to Properly Configure Read-More Tag

Why You Ought To Use the Read More Tag In WordPress and How To Configure It Properly

By Arun Basil Lal | Published: September 18, 2009

With the buzz surrounding Google’s penalty for duplicate content, more bloggers have resorted to showing only excerpts on the home page of their blogs. These excerpts usually end with a link prompting the reader to click if he/she wants to continue reading the article. These links are created using the wordpress Read More Tag.

Wanna Read More?

Why You ought to Use the Read More Tag

The read more tag can dramatically increase the amount of pageviews on your site/blog. I would have gone further to explain this but Alex of Blogussion has already done an excellent job explaining this with his post; Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts.

How to Configure The Read More Tag Effectively

Wrong configuration of the read more tag could leave you ranking for useless anchor texts such as “Read the rest of this entry” or “Continue reading”. What I’m saying in essence is that you MUST add nofollow to the Read More link. Since I’m a huge fan of the less wordpress plug-in movement, I prefer to edit the file directly. Follow the steps below to add nofollow to the read more tag.

Using FTP, navigate the wp-includes folder of your wordpress installation and download the file, post-template.php. Remember to store a backup of this file should things go wrong along the way.

Depending on which editor you use (I use Macromedia Dreamweaver), open the file and find line 226 or search for the line that has the following code:
$output .= apply_filters( 'the_content_more_link', ' $more_link_text", $more_link_text );
Change the above code to:
$output .= apply_filters( 'the_content_more_link', ' $more_link_text", $more_link_text );
Save the file and upload it back to the wp-includes folder and reload your blog’s home page.

The above tweak would have done two things to your read more link.

The link would no longer have the #more-postid attached to the end of the url e.g. http://www.ooo.com/goofy.html#more-301 becomes http://www.ooo.com/goofy.html and when you click on the link, the page opens right at the beginning of the post and not at the beginning of the read more tag function. This is helpfully for your readers who find it hard to remember what they just read in the excerpt.
Checking the link using Zachary Fox’s Firefox Addon, Nofollow, reveals that the link is now a nofollow link.

NOTE: You’ll have to apply the above tweak each time you upgrade to a new version of Wordpress. Unfortunately not everybody is as patient as I am so some of you are better off getting this fix using a plug-in though while writing this piece, I googled but couldn’t find a plug-in that does this.

Update: The Custom More Link Plugin does exactly the same job. If you don’t like editing the code, use the plugin.

This article was written by Udegbunam Chukwudi who in his pastime writes about free blogging and make money online tips @ his blog Strictly Online Biz. Topics already covered at his blog include Upgrading & Speeding up wordpress blogs, Making Money through Paid Online Surveys, Google Adsense, Web Hosting Reselling and CPA Marketing amongst others.