I installed The Ultimate Tag Warrior. I can now:
- Get more blog traffic and improve SEO. How? I can easily make my articles appear in loads of Technorati tag searches. I can also inform search engines know this article is “about” a tagged topic.
- Tempt visitors to stay longer. How? By posting an auto-magically created “related articles” list at the bottom of each blog post.
Thank you to Tricia and Andy Beard who both told me of this plugin.
Is “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” compatible with “Hide Sponsored Categories” and “Kontera Control?”
When I was writing “Hide Sponsored Categories”, Tricia asked me how my plugin would interact with “The Ultimate Tag Warrior”.
Before I answer that, I bet some of you are wondering, what are “Hide Sponsored Categories” and “Kontera Control?” They are two complimentary tools I consider to be “Plugins for Posties!”
Kontera control lets posties keep Kontera Ads out of PPP articles — thus making you more money. To keep Kontera ads out, a postie needs to create a category, designate that the category for excluding Kontera ads and then place posts in that category. (Most people name this category “Sponsored” or “PPP” or something similar. Oh… and the plugin does about three or four more things.)
However, if you place a post in a “category” then, normally, the “name” of the category (for example, “Sponsored) will display in the list of categories at the bottom of posts and that post will end up in an archive full of sponsored posts.
Many sponsors hate seeing the word “Sponsored” appearing on their posts and the abhor having the post sit in a category full of sponsored posts! Many loyal posties also hate this. Some advertiser won’t pay you if you mention the ad is sponsored.
So, I wrote HideSponsoredCategories to “hide” that category and lets a blogger transform any category into an internal logical variable that never appears to blog visitors in any way, shape or form. (The plugin does more than this.)
Compatibility issues with “The Ultimate Tag Warrior?
So, the question is, if I hide a category with “Hide Sponsored Categories”, will they still be hidden when I use “The Ultimate Tag Warrior”.
Unfortunately, the answer is “sort of”; the full explanation is a bit involved.
What I’ve found so far is that “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” mostlyplays well with my HideSponsoredCategories plugin. It works in the sense that my HideSponsoredCategories plugin will hide every single “category” you want to hide.
However, if you run “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” and also use Hide Sponsored Categories, you will need to be careful about checking “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” box that automatically ads “categories” to your “tag” list.
Why?! Because “categories” ≠ “tags”! “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” creates “tags” which resemble “categories”, but WordPress considers them different things. They are different “things” even if both are called the same name- like “Sponsored”. So, basically, when you tag, WordPress will store a list of “tags” and another list of “categories”.
It’s possible for the same “name” or “word” to appear on both lists!
So, if the word (or name) “Sponsored” is on both a “tag” and a “category” lists, and you tell “The Ulitimate Tag Warrior” to display your tags in your individual posts, the “Sponsored” tag will appear in the list created by “The Ultimate Tag Warrior”.
So, for now, if you want to hide the word and/or name “Sponsored” using “HideSponsoredCategories” “ do not check the box that automatically puts every matching “category” into the “tag” list. (For what it’s worth, you can always add any word to the tag list manually. )
Can the minor issue be fixed?
Eventually, I’ll look into ways to prevent any “tags” using the same words as a category you want to hide from displaying in the post. I want to see if people want to use “HideSponsoredCategories” at all before coding more features.
Meanwhile, I’m using both and I’m going to automatically add categories to tags because this blog is too new to qualify for Pay Per Post! 