Inline Jump To Links

Then I did a search for “wordpress multiple loops” and noticed an additional jump to link within the description text.

Google has picked that section of the page as being more relevant to my search terms and has included a link to that anchor. Not only that but the description is taken from the page content immediately after that anchor point and heading. Clever.

Let’s look at the source code

In this example, looking at the page source code reveals an anchor tag followed by a heading tag followed by a paragraph of content.

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<a name="Multiple_Loops_in_Action" id="Multiple_Loops_in_Action"></a>
<h4><span class="mw-headline">Multiple Loops in Action</span></h4>
<p>The best way to understand how to use multiple loops is to actually show an example of its use...

It’s unclear wether Google in picking the “Multiple Loops in Action” link text from the anchor name or the following heading text.

Interestingly the ‘mw-headline’ class applied to the heading seems to be a fairly standard class applied to headings in Wikis, so maybe this is what Google is picking up on.

I think I may have to try out some of this HTML markup and see what happens…

Further Reading

• Official Google Blog: Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets
• Google “Jump To” Links Within Search Snippets
• Google Jump To Links in Snippets

…then I stumbled across the WP e-Commerce XML Sitemap plugin by Lee Willis.

The plugin worked well with WP e-Commerce 3.7.5 (the latest version) apart from a few minor issues. I got in touch with Lee and suggested a few tweaks/fixes – he has just released an updated version:

• Unpublished products are now not added to sitemap.
• Is now compatible with WordPress installations with custom table prefix.

You can download the latest version here…

One plugin I recommend that everyone should add to their WordPress installation is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

This plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap of your posts and pages and ping supporting search engines to notify them that the sitemap has been updated.

But the best thing about this plugin for other plugin developers is it provides hooks so you can ‘borrow’ it’s functionality so that your plugin can add additional pages into the XML sitemap that is generated.

So if you’re a WordPress plugin developer, read on…

How to add pages to the XML sitemap

To illustrate how to implement the XML Sitemaps hook, I will base the example on the WP e-Commerce plugin (please note, I originally implemeted this with version 3.6.12 of the WP e-Commerce plugin so it may not work with more recent versions). We will create a function that will add all of this plugin’s product pages into the XML sitemap produced by Google XML Sitemaps.

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin provides the hook “sm_buildmap” which gets triggered whenever the plugin re-builds the sitemap file. We are going to create a function “wp_ecommerce_sm” which will get called by this hook.

So, here’s the function code:

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function wp_ecommerce_sm() {
   global $wpdb;
   if ( class_exists('GoogleSitemapGenerator') ) {
      $generatorObject = &GoogleSitemapGenerator::GetInstance();
      $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT * FROM `" . $wpdb->prefix . "product_list` WHERE `active` IN('1') ORDER BY `id` DESC";
      $product_list = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);
      foreach ( $product_list as $product ) {
         $purchase_link = wpsc_product_url($product['id']);
         $purchase_link = str_replace('&', '&', $purchase_link);
         if ($generatorObject != null) $generatorObject->AddUrl($purchase_link, time(), "daily", 0.5);
      }
   }
}
add_action("sm_buildmap", "wp_ecommerce_sm");

The main points to note in this function are…

Check that the Google XML Sitemaps exists (is installed):

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if ( class_exists('GoogleSitemapGenerator') ) {

Get an instance of the Google XML Sitemap plugin:

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$generatorObject = &GoogleSitemapGenerator::GetInstance();

Loop through all our additional pages that we want to add to the sitemap, in this case the WP e-Commerce product pages:

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$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT * FROM `" . $wpdb->prefix . "product_list` WHERE `active` IN('1') ORDER BY `id` DESC";
$product_list = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);
foreach ( $product_list as $product ) {
   // Add pages to sitemap here
}

And within our loop, add our pages like this:

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if ($generatorObject != null) $generatorObject->AddUrl($purchase_link, time(), "daily", 0.5);

And lastly we need to add the hook to call this function whenever the XML sitemap is rebuilt:

add_action("sm_buildmap", "wp_ecommerce_sm");

Is that all there is to it?

Well, not really. Your still have to trigger the sitemap to re-build to include your new pages. You can do this manually by going to your XML Sitemaps setting page and clicking the link to rebuild to force the sitemap to re-build. Ideally however you would try to get your plugin to do this automatically whenever you add/edit/delete one of your pages. I couldn’t find an obvious hook to easily do this so that is something I would like to see adding in a future version of the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Download

Download the above code packaged as a WordPress plugin using the link below:

I have seen a lot of advice from SEO consultants recommending the use of “nofollow” on links to prevent Google leaking your PageRank out to other web sites and therefore concentrating the passing of PageRank to other pages on your site.

For example, if your page had 10 PageRank points and 10 links to other pages, 5 of which were set to “nofollow”, the other 5 pages would each carry a PageRank of 2 points (ie share the full 10 points between the 5 links).

It would seem from what Matt says that this isn’t exactly how Google works. Sculpting the links on your page to concentrate link traffic to other pages does not equate to a concentrated amount of PageRank being passed to those pages.

In the example above, adding “nofollow” does prevent PageRank being passed through those links but the other 5 links will still only receive 1 PageRank point per link.

In general, Matt suggests whenever you’re linking around within your own site don’t use “nofollow”. Only use “nofollow” on links when you do not want a page to be indexed by Google, or for external links of which you may not have been able to verify the content (for example, a link added by a commenter on your blog).

If that makes no sense, Matt explains it much more clearly…