WordPress subpages going supplemental: the fix

I noticed that the subpages for my blog (you can find links to them in the footer of this page), were all going supplemental. This wasn't really surprising as those subpages were displaying exactly the same as the frontpage: 5 full posts and a "next" and "previous" link to the next pages. This meant that page 32 was a full 32 clicks away from the blog frontpage...

Looking around if other people had the same problem, I noticed that Jaimie didn't... He had posted about these issues a while ago:

1. Stop SEO Death By Pagination
2. 3 WordPress Hacks For SE-Friendly Blog Archives

Basically I did a few things:

1. I changed the title and breadcrumbs on subpages.
2. I made the subpages display excerpts (the first 300 words) instead of the full post.
3. I changed the pagination using Jaimie's pagerfix plugin which he was kind enough to update for WordPress 2.1.

1. Changing the title tag and breadcrumbs.

I used the following code in header.php to make sure the title reflects the page you're on:

if (is_home() ) {
	bloginfo('name');
	if (get_query_var('paged') > 1) {
		echo ' - Page ' . get_query_var('paged');
	}
}

Of course you can adjust your template to make the title display right for you.
In my index.php I added the following for the breadcrumbs:

<div id="breadcrumbs"> <a href="/">Home</a>
< ?php
	if (is_home() && get_query_var('paged') > 1) {
		echo '/ <a href="http://yoast.com/">SEO Blog</a> / ';
		echo 'Page ' . get_query_var('paged');
	} else {
		echo ' / SEO Blog ';
	}
?>
</div>

2. Changing the subpages to display excerpts

I added the following into the loop for posts to make them display excerpts on the subpages:

< ?php if (is_home() && (!$paged || $paged == 1) || is_search()
 || is_single() || is_page()) {
	the_content('Read the rest of this entry »');
} else {
?>
<p>
  Archived; click post title to view the full post.<br />
  <br />
  <strong>Excerpt:</strong> < ?= substr(strip_tags($post->post_content), 0, 300); ?>
  <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">…</a>;
</p>
< ?php } ?>

I've done this for my archive pages as well, as I want my post pages to rank higher.

3. Changing the pagination

The last thing I did was installing Jaimie's pagerfix plugin, and calling it in the template with the following code:

pager_fix(" "," "," ","« Previous page","Next Page »","strong");

Jaimie covers a lot of this in his book on PHP and SEO, which you should definitly go get if you're doing a lot of this stuff!