Making our blogs easier to crawl by the various search engine bots is the main reason why we put up with so much crap, from permalinks (nice ones too), categorisation to sitemaps. But there’s one more thing you can do to improve your crawlability – which is to ensure that every page is within two or three clicks away from your main index page.

Over at Graywolf’s SEO Blog, there is a suggestion (and method) to display all your WordPress posts in each category without page breaks – i.e. if you have a hundred posts in your Photo category, you’d display them all on your Photo category’s first page. This way, GoogleBot won’t have to go all the way to your 20th Photo category page to find the 100th post (assuming you have 5 posts per page).

And the solution: A custom query plug-in which allows you to configure the number of posts to display on each category. There’s a version for WordPress 2.0+ and another one for WP 1.5 and below.

But of course, as a commenter on Graywolf’s post points out, you’ll screw the usability of your category pages. Who would want to load a 100 posts in one shot anyway? Well, I feel this is where Movable Type excels over WordPress’ default install. If you’ve used Movable Type, you would have noticed that there is something known as a Master Archive page (by clicking the word Archive above your monthly archive links) – which lists only all the titles (with links) of your posts. This would allow you to maintain your old and less cumbersome category pages and yet attain higher crawlability through a separate Master Archive page.

If you want to use this title listing method for your archive pages instead, you can try DC’s Nicer Archives plug-in. It’s not WordPress 2.0+ ready and lacks quite a bit of features, including permalink use. But it’s a start for anybody who wants to improve on it.

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