Making Tags & Category Links Site-wide not WordPress-wide

  • Anyone know how to do this? The tags on my posts show all *wordpress* posts tagged with a keyword, rather than the tags on my site. That’s bad for a couple of reasons:

    1. 99.9% of other websites don’t do that. As a user you expect to be shown other relevant articles on the site you’re visiting.
    2. There’s no indication given that you’re going to be taken to an external site or a list of pages from an external site.

    How can I either make the links relative to my site only (which, really, it should be by default, WordPress staff) or remove the functionality altogether? It’s a pain.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • You can’t. That’s how they work.

    The tag and category clouds/lists in your sidebar will be site-wide only.

  • Technically speaking, you don’t have a site at all; you have a subdomain of WordPress.com, which means those links are not to an external site at all.

    But that’s not the real issue. I think you can make your links site-specific, but only by setting your site to not be found by search engines, etc. I don’t THINK you have to make it fully private, but you do have to render yourself invisible to Bots, etc. on your Settings page.

    Of course, with self-hosted WP you wouldn’t have this issue, but then you also wouldn’t have the huge SEO boost the global tag pages give you.

  • Firstly thanks for the replies!

    @rosclarke: How would one go about suggesting this as a change for the WP developers to consider? It serves no purpose other than to confuse users.

    @raincoaster: That argument holds true until you factor in websites that elect to use a purchased domain, as mine does. Users of my website should have an experience that’s the same as all the other websites out there that use tags and categories for posts, not one which inexplicably conforms to WordPress’s mysterious community-led criteria for how my site should work. At the very least there should be the option to turn the feature off, no?

    If you read an article on a website and see that the person has tagged it as, say, “george w. bush interview”, you’d expect to be able to see the rest of their interview with George W. Bush by clicking on the tag to view the rest of the posts they have tagged as such. In many cases the use of global tags will only provide undesirable results, depending on the specificity of the tags and the content they are describing.

    The SEO boost, for the record, isn’t something I’m interested in at all. Good content speaks for itself.

  • To make a suggestion, contact staff using the link on the support page (link at the top of the forum page.)

  • Believe me, I’m not advocating for the way it’s laid out. I’m just explaining how it works. You still have your .wordpress.com address, it’s just hidden under your mapped domain name.

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