Category Trades on Blogs
 

emmanuelle asked me the other day if bloggers did category trades and I had to admit I hadn't really thought about it and that as far as I know the community isn't set up to actually do category trades.

But it seems like it would be a good idea. Much better than simply letting your blogroll roll around on all of your pages or not having anything but index page trades.

I tested it and it is possible to do, at least with WP blogs and would be more than happy to share my find but the question is....Would anyone be interested?

I'm looking for feed back on what others think of the idea.

I think it would be a good idea because if you got a teen site, you can link to other teen sites in your menu, when they are looking for teen stuff they will watch for the word teen, and they arent really up to scanning 100 links to check if there is any teen :P

Perhaps I'm not quite clear on what I'm asking.

On your blog you create multiple categories relevant to your posts. So lets say you create a category for NN Teens which is associated with all of your posts about NN Teens. When someone clicks on the category NN Teens they are taken to an archive page of all the NN Teens posts you've made.

I'm talking about doing link trades on those archive pages.

Mmh okay, sorry thought u ment on index, but yes, I totally agree on that aswel and I would be up for it. Can't really find a downside nor a reason not to do it..

this is a good point, i have just started trading category links. as the category titles are a main seo element it can only benefit a blog imho. and it looks more "natural" to a se than a blog with incoming links only to index. so i'm quite sure you had good results with it?

maybe it would be even worth to start some trades even to single posts?!

I haven't actually started trading categories yet but I finished setting up my theme and will be posting for trades after this.

Linking exchange to posts are called a trackback and I've done them with some pretty good results.

We've set it up and can accomodate targeted trades with smoking, gay and with foot fetish

Your talking trades not in posts right? Like sidebar category archive pages, right? That would be interesting, did'nt think there was an easy way. Well, maybe not easy.:)

Yep, thats what we're talking about and it really isn't that difficult. If I can figure it out....and in involves the letters PHP....then it couldnt have been too hard.

If you want, I'll post how to do it.

Trev set mine up for me, I *think* he did it right in WP rather than php.

I think it's a great way to get secondary pages better indexed, and traffic hitting more targeted pages.

For example: http://www.balloondirectory.com/cate...-and-balloons/

On this page I can advertise and trade only with foot related sites, toplists and other foot fetish blog categories- thus making the traffic more productive, and incoming visitors a little more satisfied whether they choose to stay or leave, than if they had simply hit the index page.

I completely agree....which is why I decided to steal your idea :D

Are you customizing the WP links organizer or integrating a stand alone links script for the trades?

I think this is a great idea, Id love to set it up on my multi-category general blogs.

Originally I set it up using WP links organizer. I've since changed that over to the link exchange script I use.

Very cool. Was there a need to make a lot of changes to either script?

Not really, a bunch of elseif statements to setup the categories in my blog sidebar. I did have to do something a little funky to get it to actually make the script calls to my link exchange script. But I use link organizer which already allows you to categorize your trades and runs trades across multiple sites.

All in all, I guess I spent a couple hours setting it up.

Sounds like a great idea to me. So I am guessing some one would need link organizer to make it work?

You could always make a new table to store and fetch links, like a links script. Unless thats what your talking about anyway.

Wonder how many webmasters would do it? With no one to trade with..lol

I can see this could work with blog->LL also and visa versa.

No, you can use the link management part of WP. In fact, I still use a combination of both. This is a snippet of the code I am using:
In the first part, I am defining what I want on my home page. As you can see, the wp_get_linksbyname() statements are calling specific categories I've set up with the WP links manager. The elseif selects the category ID which was created when I created the category. The rest is a call, to LO, but you could easily replace that with either the calls to specific link categories or a compeletely different script.

Clear as mud, I hope so, it's friday night and....well you know!

Wouldn't it be easier just to use different templates for different category pages? I think that the if elseif routines can get a bit messy so I try and avoid them wherever possible

I decided to use Joomla for my blog because I design non-adult sites with that script. I am able to set-up content on select pages so I am capapble of category hard link trades though I've done none yet.

It does allow me to setup category trades with LL's but I've also been kind of surprised at how many bloggers have been willing to setup link exchanges to my general blog categories from their niche blogs.

Plus why do you think I started this thread, hoping a few more bloggers would join in.

I'm sure there are some different ways to do this and that the way I'm doing it could not be the best. I hadn't thought about swapping out templates so I may look into it.

Mmh yes, even though I haven't had any luck setting it up yet the idea seems good, quality traffic should be a tad higher. Would be nice if somebody explains (I know every theme is different but still) how to add category trades.

Schpork

I've been playing around more with this over the weekend and I think Thumbler might have the right idea with themes. So I'll try to explain it using that mode.

I can't emphasize enough, be sure and back up your theme. Also, if you can't follow that theme well enough to understand how it assembles all of the pieces together to make your web page, then you should spend some time reading the tutorials on wordpress.org before you do this.

I'll use the WP link organizer in the example.

Make a link trade category for each of your post categories you want to trade with. Be sure to make a main category for your index page. In the example, I'll explain how to do the main and an amateur category setup for separate trades. Just keep repeating until you have trades setup for all the categories you want to trade with.

1. In WP, create two link categories, main and amateur.
2. Check for the ID number on your post categories for amateur and make a note of it.
3. Copy the archive.php and sidebar.php files from your theme.
4. Rename the copy of the archive.php to category-ID.php where ID is the ID number from step 2.
5. Rename the copy of sidebar.php to sidebaramateur.php
6. Edit sidebaramateur.php. Where your "LINKS" or blogroll or whatever is located, replace that statement with: 7. Edit category-ID.php. Where you find your call to the sidebar , replace with 8. Edit sidebar.php Where your "LINKS" or blogroll or whatever is located, replace that statement with: 9. Upload updated files to your server and test. If you have a problem, simply deleting the category-ID.php file should resolve any issues.
10. Follow these same steps, except 8 for all the category trades you want to setup.

Since WP themes come in multiple varieties these steps may or may not work with your theme. For example, one of my themes actually has 4 files it uses to make up the sidebar so this wouldn't have worked as written for that theme. You should familiarize yourself well enough with the theme you are using to make sure you understand how it makes up your pages.

Note: your main page and all other pages that are not category pages will have the "main" links on them.

With a few minor differences, this is basically the way I did it for Emmanuelle. Quick and easy.

Mmh, very weird, I've tried almost everything, I even tried to call the amateur links on the main page but it just won't respond, it still displays all the links.. I will try with another blog just to check..

Greetz, Schpork

It seems that if you are using WP 2.1.X then the wp_get_linksbyname() has been depreciated. Use wp_get_links(category) in it's place where category is the ID number of the link category.