Comment on WordPress SEO by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO WordPress Categories Widget can be reduced in size in two ways.

Forward planning: Put categories within categories like you see at this site of mine with over 130,000 recipes (127,000 pages of that site is indexed in Google which is very good) and loads of Categories but only 27 are shown. I have 27 top level categories the rest (hundreds of them) are sub-categories and are not shown on the sidebar. They still receive links via the Posts as they link to the categories they are in.

Include/Exclude Categories: You can add code to your functions.php file that will either block lots of categories or include a set of categories. This involves a lot of effort and I’d not advise this for a growing autoblog as you’ll be editing your functions file all the time and you might find some post and categories lack links from within the site if you aren’t careful. If you need to go that route LMK and I’ll point you in the right direction.

Although the current categories are already live and it’s usually not a good idea for changing categories after they are live and indexed, I’d go with the forward planning option.

Either put current categories within current categories that makes sense: if you had a category called “WordPress SEO” you could put Categories like “WordPress SEO Themes” and “WordPress SEO Tutorial” within it. Or add new categories to put your current and new categories within, only took a quick look at your site, but an example might be “American Articles” and put anything American within it. Get it down to a reasonable number of top level categories and any new categories have as sub-categories.

You might take a short term SEO hit if the categories you move around (when a categories is made a sub-category it’s URL is changed), but for the medium term it’s what I’d do.

If it was a popular site with loads of traffic going directly to the category articles I’d setup 301 redirects within the .htaccess file, but as this is an autoblog it’s probably not getting a lot of traffic so I wouldn’t bother.

David