Hello ! I want you to share your thoughts and experiences about the "read more" link on blogs from a SEO perspective . Do you think it consumes unnecessary link juice ? If yes, how did you "optimize" it ? - Replaced the link with some JavaScript code ? - Removed completely the link ? - another way which you can describe in your message ? Thanks !
No need to remove it.. Best way to utilize it is make it more descriptive like below: Full Story Of "post title". I think it will really help...
"Read more" is TERRIBLE link text and is NOT going to help your blog post that it points to rank for anything other than a search for "read more". I'm in the process of throwing up a blog and plan to change my template so that the "Read more" link is rendered as "Read more about short version of the title of blog post" where "short version of the title of blog post" is first first from a custom field called "read_more_text". If there is no read_more_text value for the post then I'll simply pull the post title. I'll enter a short value for read_more_text when the title of the post is long. Even if the title of the post is short, I'll likely use it to enter a slight variation of the targeted keyword phrase so that I can vary the link text of internal links to the same post. With this minor tweek to the template, you now have another inbound link to your posts that should contain the keyword phrase (or a slight variation there of) that you want the post to rank for.
If the read more points to your blog posts(As home page shows first para of the post and shows as click to read more...) then you don't need to care. If you are mentioning the resources (out bound) then you need to care about it. The better blogging way is don't block link juice to the source and add a link to the source. It is known as adding value to blog readers.
Well it's not a problem for me, I'm not asking help, just want to know how you all deal with this and if there's something interesting then I'll change my approach Before Matt Cutts' post on internal nofollow, I used nofollow on the "read more" links . Actually, I changed those links to something like "read more about [TITLE]..." ( like Canonical said ) . If I remove the link, I'll save some link juice, but the readers will be penalized as some of my readers don't know that they can also click on the post title . And without that link, they can't know if it's the short or full version of the post . So no, I can't remove it . If I replace it with some Javascript code which can't be read by search engines, the majority of my readers will have no problems, but the 15~20% who deactivate Javascript ( or use some plugins like Noscript ) will be penalized as they wont see the link ... It's also possible to do some cloaking ( doing a Search engine version without the "read more" links, and a user version with the links ) but Google doesn't like that !