The bad news is that it might not work with all Wordpress blogs and that the user who wants to exclude the categories needs to know their category ID. The first problem is easier to solve. Excluding categories from Wordpress feeds works if the Wordpress blog is not using the Feedburner feed redirection plugin or a comparable plugin. The feed redirection plugin redirects all feed requests (no matter if they are category specific or the full feed) to an RSS service like Feedburner. This prevents that users can create individual feeds based on categories, authors or tags. It also prevents the exclusion of categories in the feed.

Finding out the category IDs of a Wordpress blog is the second obstacle. Most webmasters use pretty permalinks which do not display IDs on the website. The only way to find out without asking the website owner is trial and error. Is is possible to open categories with their IDs in Wordpress even if the Pretty Permalinks option is enabled. To open a category with a category ID one would open the following url in a web browser:

http://www.ghacks.net/index.php?cat=23

This would open the Linux category here at Ghacks. This can be a very time consuming process as I have seen categories with five digits. So its probably best to ask the administrator about the category IDs. (Feel free to post additional solutions in the comments).

To exclude categories from RSS feeds in Wordpress one would use the following syntax:

http://www.ghacks.net/feed/?cat=-23

This removes category 23 from the main feed of the website. It is possible to exclude multiple categories from the feed, simply append an & and another cat=-xx in the end:

http://www.ghacks.net/feed/?cat=-23&cat=-9592

This excludes the Linux and Mac categories from the RSS feed.

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Advanced tips are not that easy to come by and most websites running a Wordpress blog do not have them implemented. This article will list some options that center around the nofollow tag. Nofollow basically tells search engines like Google to not count the link vote that is usually being passed when linking on the Internet. Why is that beneficial? A website has a certain linking power. Each link that is pointing to internal and external resources gets a piece of that linking power. Not all pages should be treated equally however which is what this article is about. It makes for example no sense to pass linking power to internal pages that you do not want to link for, think of privacy policies, contact pages, login, log off or social bookmarking links.

Wordpress themes come with a surprising amount of links, the majority of which is not set to nofollow. Here are a few areas where you should consider placing the nofollow link tag in a Wordpress blog:

• The more (read more) tag. The page is already linked from the title of the post properly.
• Wordpress meta data
• Pages like Privacy Policies, Contact Us
• Social Bookmarking links

To add the nofollow link one would simply add the rel="nofollow"
tag to the link structure which is not a problem if the link is displayed in the source code of the theme, for example:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>

There are however links (like the previously mentioned more tag) that cannot be manipulated in the theme source as the link is created by a php function.

Here is how you make the more tag in Wordpress nofollow:

• Open the file post-template.php in the wp-includes folder.
• Locate the following line beginning with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink()..

• Replace it with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">$more_link_text</a>";

• You basically add the rel=\"nofollow\" tag to the line

This ensures that all more tags will be nofollow from then on.

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Webmasters can however utilize tag pages better in their Wordpress blogs by creating so called custom tag pages which can contain any information they want. If you open the page above you notice that it does not contain a listing of blog excerpts but a custom page for that tag.

Wordpress provides the means to create those custom tag pages easily. Custom tag pages can be created in the theme directory of the Wordpress directory by adding a new template file to the theme. This new template file needs to begin with tag followed by the post slug of the tag. In the case of the Windows 7 Download tag it would have to be named tag-windows-7-download.php.

Custom tag pages have a higher priority than the default ones that show only excerpts of the posts. The easiest way to fill the custom tag with content is the following:

Wordpress looks for the following files in order to create those tag pages:

• tag-slug.php
• tag.php
• archive.php
• index.php

Look into your theme folder and see if there is a tag.php file. If it is copy its contents and create a new php file that is using the tag-slug.php as its name. If ther eis no tag.php look for archive.php and finally index.php.

Now simply add content to the file. It might take some experimentation at the beginning but it can be really worth it in the long run. If you have any questions or additions let me know in the comments.

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Another thing that is really annoying in Wordpress 2.7 is the fact that you can either delete all comments on the page, selected comments or all spam comments at once. At 20 spam comments per page and thousands in total this can take a long time to flip through and delete.

The Wordpress hack is actually quite easy to perform even for webmasters who have no knowledge whatsoever regarding html and php. The file that is responsible for the amount of comments that are displayed is called edit-comments.php. It can be found in the wp-admin folder. Make sure you backup that file before you apply the changes so that you can revert back if something should go wrong.

Locate the following line in the file, it should be around line 182 in the file:

$comments_per_page = apply_filters('comments_per_page', 20, $comment_status);

The only thing that you need to do is to change the figure 20 to another figure, e.g. 100 so that it looks like this:

$comments_per_page = apply_filters('comments_per_page', 100, $comment_status);

Just save the file again and check the display of the comments in the admin interface to make sure everything is working correctly.

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