Annoying or good thing about WordPress? Global/local tags and categories
Suppose you’re reading a nice blog on wordpress.com. You’d like to read more on the same subject, so you click the category link or tag link under/over/next to the post…what happens? Suddenly you’re taken to the wordpress.com site where you get a list of all posts on all blogs on wordpress.com that use the same category or tag. But you only wanted to see posts on this blog…Well, then you have to click the categories or tags in the sidebar… that is, if the blog owner uses his widgets. Most do, luckily.
Some people probably love this feature. I don’t. It’s called local and global tags and categories. Global tags/categories search the whole of wordpress.com, local tags/categories search this blog only. It is a nice feature that saves you from going to wordpress.com and typing a search term in the search box. It can also help drive traffic to your blog, that is, if your post on this matter (category/tag) ranks higher than the post on the blog whose category/tag is clicked, because your post will come up first on wordpress.com.
If you’re familiar with WordPress you will know where to click to find posts on this blog only and where to click to find posts on wordpress.com. If you’re new to WordPress this can be confusing, because the logical place to click to find more posts on the same subject is to click the tags/categories near the post, not the tags/categories in the sidebar.
Unfortunately there’s no way to turn this off. Well, if WordPress really wants to have this feature, at least it should say something like “Search other WordPress blogs for… ” before the global tags/categories. Then I would not mind having this feature. In fact, it would be a plus. The way it is now I really don’t like it.
Btw, TypePad only operates local tags/categories, and since I’m mostly a TypePad user, maybe that’s why I’m so confused by this. What about you, do you like this feature?
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The compulsory links to global tags are basically an SEO ploy to boost the ranking of the global tag pages in Google, because ads are shown to people arriving at those pages from search engines.
I still don’t know why they refuse to label the global links as such. The best I can come up with is that they want to trick people into leaving your blog and going to other wordpress.com blogs because a) it’s good for their stats to keep people on the site for longer and b) the longer they can keep people on the site, the greater the chance of them signing up for their own account.
I agree with you to some degree. I don’t mind the tags per se, as I’ve written in my post, what I don’t like is that they appear to be referring your blog, when i fact they are not. But this thing goes both ways. It may take your viewers away from you; on the other hand it also takes viewers away from other blogs and onto your blog.