Blogging Tip: Don’t Display Your Archives
September 11th, 2007
Have you ever gone to a website before and really liked what you saw, so you decided to browse their archives? Me either!
Like most bloggers, if a quick review of a site’s homepage appeals to me, I will click a button in my browser and subscribe to the site’s feed.  From there it sits in a trial folder in my feed reader for a few weeks. After those few weeks have gone by, if I like what I see, I then move the feed into a more permanent feed folder where it will remain. If I decide I don’t want to keep the feed, I delete it.Â
Archives are for search engines, not new readers.  We live in a “What have you done for me lately” world, and I want to know what the author is talking about now, not what he/she said 6 months ago.Â
As a result, I truly believe that WordPress users should not need to rely on categories or archives for navigation on their site, as they have the benefit of the Popularity Contest, Related Posts, Landing Sites, and In Series plugins to do that work automatically for them. Getting in the habit of linking internally to relevant posts in your archives should provide that last bit of navigation your readers need to find what they are looking for.Â
Today while browsing my feeds, I ran across a post at Sebastian’s Pamphlets that sums it up better than I ever could of.  The post is titled SEO-sanitizing a WordPress theme in 5 minutes, where he provides a bunch of useful SEO tips that are easy and won’t take very long to complete.  Here is the quote:
You may ask why I tell you to remove all references to the archives. The answer is that firstly nobody needs them, and secondly they irritate search engines with senseless and superfluous content duplication. As long as you provide logical, topically organized and short paths to your posts, none of your visitors will browse the archives. Would you use the white pages to lookup a phone number when entries aren’t ordered alphabetically but by date of birth instead? Nope, solely blogging software produces crap like that as sole or at least primary navigation.
The bold is my emphasis. If you do decide that your site needs the archives and/or categories displayed, be sure to display only excerpts on those pages or instruct the search engines to avoid them completely via a Robots.txt file.Â
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Well, some users do check the archives. Maybe not from a year ago, but you need to make posts from the last few weeks easily accessible. We originally never had the WordPress calendar displayed for our archives, but last year several readers were requesting it. That’s because they wouldn’t be around for a few days, and then checking up on that news was always a pain. That’s the same reason we implemented the drop-down menu for today’s posts, yesterday’s posts, and our main CyberNotes.
So don’t ditch the archives all together, because you’d probably be surprised at how many people use them.
Well then, I never knew I was the weird one. I browse through blog archives quite often when I find a new blog.
I also look through new blogs archives, mostly to find out how old the blog is, but I also look through to find any interesting articles by the blog.
Ryan – I think your situation is unique because you have a very passionate readership and your readers actually spend a lot of time on your website, rather than reading through a feed.
The average blogger probably won’t update their site enough each day to warrant a calendar or something, but for your site that makes perfect sense.
Jake and Michael – That is interesting that you both view the archives before subscribing.
Readers do actually have the option of viewing my archives on this site, but they were moved on to a separate page and are displayed in my menu at the top. I also have tags available instead of categories. My thought process is that this way neither my categories or archives are displayed in a way that draws attention, but those really looking for them should be able to find them.
I choose to display full posts in my archives and tag pages, so I use Robots.txt to avoid them being indexed and recorded as duplicate content.
I agree with your line of thought about archives. I think it’ll help having one less thing in the sidebar if it’s offered in the main menu for a lot of bloggers.
I like your use of tags. But, if I were a new reader I don’t get a quick overview of the things you talk about here. If you don’t use categories, then a tag cloud would be of great help to pull articles by context. I am working on the same to remove my categories section and just having a tag cloud like I used to.
I do use robots.txt as well to avoid duplicate content from my full post archives.
I also will read the archives. It gives me a better sense of the person writing and if I like what has been posted so far I want to find out what I missed. Many of the blogs I frequent are hints/tips/how to sites so that increases my desire to explore past posts.
As a disclaimer, I should probably say that I check Ryan’s site first nearly everyday.
I will generally go back one or two months, and if I find it really interesting I will eventually read every post. If you really peak my interest I will read the comments also. Imagine what it takes to get me to leave a reply.
taf
K – I’m not a huge fan of tag clouds. I’m not really opposed to them, just not a big fan for some reason.
Taf – Wow, glad I was able to inspire a comment then!
I guess archives pull a little more weight than I realized. Maybe I should start a discussion about the various types of archives and see what people prefer if people do use them.
To me, by subscribing I can dig through the archives because my feed reader pulls and displays old posts as well until marked as read, so I feel like I get a good feel for the author(s) of the site that way.
Kyle.. nothing wrong with that. I have seen at many places where the tags get overused and the tag cloud has every possible word included in it making the list totally useless. But, I think a well orchestrated tag cloud is a nice navigation tool, IMHO. I wonder how many people actually use it though.