Most blog templates present hyperlinks on the titles of single post pages. There is no reason to have an hyperlink on those titles, however, since they are pointing exactly to the current page. Secondly, the hyperlink might also cause some crawling problems for search engines, messing with the indexation of those pages.
WordPress users can remove this hyperlink by going into the Theme Editor and looking for the single.php file. Inside that file look for the line that specifies the title on the single post pages, it should be something like this:
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
Once you find the line you will need to remove the parts that make the title an active link, which include the <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"> and </a> tags. The final line should look like this:
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
If you still want to include an hyperlink to make it easier for people to copy the permalink you can place an icon near to the title, or a meta data below the post with the permalink information.
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
How for blogspot ??
Thanks you very much
Hey Daniel, it would be nice for your credibility if you followed your own advice, but you don’t — the permalink is still in the title of your single post page.
Just to be clear with the explanation in my own comment, if you use the Firefox Extension I mentioned, it grabs the TEXT of the link and the LINK and puts it into an instantly paste-able text link as:
Just becuase everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s optimal. And everyone doesn’t do it – Blogware don’t for the same reasons.
I don’t get the purpose behind removing the link from the title. It’s been followed on blogs and I guess everyone is used to it. That is also the first place I look to find the title on any blog.
Looks like I am little late for this.But Lets see…
Bez, I am speechless, thanks for the essay
It makes sense Everton, and thanks for sharing that link. I have a question though: However, do all the search engines follow the same crawling trend? Or is it only Google? Do we can confirmed source/evidence that Google crawlers in addition to the News crawler do this? If all search engines follow this technique or if there is a way to find out more, it would be really beneficial.
The problem isn’t with getting indexed, it’s about getting indexed properly. e.g a search engine may follow a backlink or the robot may visit your site directly. But, if once it gets there it can’t add all of your pages and your content to its index because it can’t navigate around your site, or work out what each section actually is, then not all of your details will make it into the index to be potentially matched against search keywords.
Everton, I get it now.
First because rarely your homepage will get listed on high rankings for keywords (usually one has 5 posts with different topics in homepage).
Everton, I had read your post about the permalinks. We both agree that hyperlinks on titles are not optimal from a SEO point of view, but I do not think that removing them from the homepage is a good idea, I would only remove from the single post pages.
Lorelle, you do have a point. However I think that you could solve the problem by placing an icon with the permalink close to the title or below the post.
I use them to direct people to my website when I want to highlight one of my paintings or collections. Leaving them to direct back to each post (as a “permalink”) might be a negative for the Search Engines. But I generally don’t use them that way anyway. I’ve been able to achieve a high listing on Google for my Belted Galloway paintings as a result. This has been my experience anyway.
Regarding the SEO I am quite positive it might affect the crawling for some search engines (no huge impact, obviously but every small bit helps), Everton from ConnectedInternet.co.uk received an email from Google News some time ago alleging that they would be able to index better his pages if they had no active link on the headlines of posts.
Please, do not recommend this. If you want your blog post featured on other blogs, keep the link in your single post titles.
Like Darren said, I find a it a bit annoying. Imagine what to submit this post to Digg, I simple go upto the title and copy the permalink and then submit it to digg. Moving upto the address bar is a bit frustrating.
3 places Andrew. All web browsers show the current url in the browser address bar. The other 2 automatically become extra and unnecessary for most people, since wordpress putting title urls inside titles is only a new trend that majority of the web users are not aware of, and may get confused since they wonder why there is a link that is pointing to itself.
I’ve got to agree with Darren on this one. I virtually expect post titles to be linked. I get really frustrated when they aren’t. It’s not too bad when the permalink is nearby the title, but it’s nutty when the permalink only appears in the post footer. Why look in two separate places for this info?!
I actually like having mine hyperlinked and find blogs that don’t do it a little frustrating. Maybe its the rhythm of blogging that I’m used to but if I want to grab a post’s link I always get it from the title of the post with a quick copy and paste. I also don’t know that it’d hinder SEO – in fact it could help it as having a link with keywords in the anchor can help SEO.
Nice one Daniel.