Boredworkers.com

Ever looked at the PR of your WP login page? If not, you might like to take a look. Chances are that the PR is between 2 and 5. Kind of silly, considering that most posts are ranked zero (0). If you’re not into SEO and PR and all that other stuff, then its no big deal. But if you are interested, then you might like to reconsider the page linkages of your current WP theme.

If you look at Boredworkers.com’s login page, you’ll probably notice that it is PR3 while Boredworkers.com’s main page is PR5. So, admittedly, I’m guilty of inefficient page linkage as well. I only realised this recently and changed the page links around to remedy it. The high login page PR can be sourced back to the login link that appears by default under the META links category.

Most themes are built based on the WP default theme which was based on Kubrick. Now the key difference is that WP’s default theme only displays the sidebar on the main page while other user created themes tend to display the sidebar on ALL the pages. In other words, while WP default has only one entry point to the login page, other themes will theoretically have hundreds depending on the number of posts on the blog.

In an earlier article, I mentioned that Google calculates PR based on a democratic voting system, where every page has an initial PR of 1 and casts their vote for other pages hence contributing some of their PR to that page. With the login link appearing on the sidebar and the sidebar appearing on all the pages within the site, it means that every page on the site is essentially voting for the login page. So it is no wonder then that the PR is the way it is.

Remedy:
The most obvious answer is to remove the META link from the sidebar if you’re going to be showing the sidebar on all pages. This will not make any immediate difference to the PR of the login page. However, it will help when Google comes around to refresh its cache of old pages. You don’t have to delete the links altogether. On the contrary, you can make so that it appears only when viewing the site’s homepage. Here’s how.

1. Fire up your favourite editor and load the sidebar.php file
2. Locate the lines that creates the META links section in the sidebar (e.g. search for ‘META’, minus the quotes)
3. Add the following line of code before the META block (Link blocks are usually surrounded by the <li>&lt/li&gt tags. Place the code BEFORE the opening tag):

   <?php if (is_home()) { ?>

4. Add the following line of code after the META block (e.g. after the closing </li> tag):

   <?php } ?>

5. Save the file and reload your site

Here’s an example of how the code will look like:

<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<li><h2>META</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href='http://www.boredworkers.com/wp-login.php'>Login</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>

With the additional logic in place, the META links will be displayed when viewing the home page and disappear on other pages. The same trick works for other sidebar links as well. So go ahead and play around with it and see what works best for you. Good luck and have fun.