Wow, it has been a while since I posted something practical that you can use on your own blogs. It’s about time that changed so I’m going to detail what I’ve found to be the best way of adding a privacy policy to your WordPress blog.
In order to play it safe it’s best to have a privacy policy, perhaps for no other reason than you want to run Google Adsense. If you’ve got no idea what should go in a Privacy Policy then I’d suggest you use this generator. Once you have your text you’d think it would simply be a case of just linking to it? The trouble with this is that since Matt Cutts revealed that nofollowed links still impact what link value you pass on (I’ve always recommended nofollowing Privacy Policies in the past) having every page on your website link to a page that is 99% duplicate content that has no outgoing internal links on it is a complete and utter waste of you hard earned link juice.
Soooo, we need to add a page to our WordPress blog and copy our privacy policy text into that. That’s all fine and dandy, your privacy policy will now be on your standard template and all those internal links will be there. At least using a followed link to your Privacy Policy will result in some of that link juice spreading back to your actual content pages. Only thing is now our Privacy Policy is included everywhere where our pages our included in your theme – most likely that means a prominent menu. This isn’t what we want at all; we prefer to keep our Privacy Policy in the footer or somewhere less prominent than our main menu!
The final piece of the jigsaw is to stop our Privacy Policy page appearing in our menus. I tried several ways of doing this including setting various statuses (based on some wrong info from the net) and even manually altering the database (worked but was a pain). In the end the easiest way I found of excluding a WordPress page from your menu was to use the Exclude Pages From navigation plugin, it’s a piss of piss to use. On each page it adds the option to “Include This Page In User Menus”, leaving it unchecked gives us the result we’re looking for. It’s now just a case of manually linking (using a standard followed link) to our Privacy Policy in the footer template of your WordPress theme. What we end up with is a Privacy Policy that is linked to from each page that also passes link juice back to your other content.
(I have a confession to make, it looks like I never implemented this technique on this blog since changing the template, will do it now!)
13 Responses to “Add A Privacy Policy To Your WordPress Blog – The Best Way”
James
November 27, 2009
Could you not just exclude the privacy policy from being indexed in your robots.txt or is there something more to it than that?
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Contexxt
November 27, 2009
I wonder what is it that makes people break their decision. You had shut down this blog, yet you never stopped. Weird.
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Paul B
November 27, 2009
I know it’s strange isn’t it? I don’t consider this an active blog (I certainly don’t promote it), I just use it as a useful vehicle for publishing content that just doesn’t suit my other websites. Throughout an average day I probably have a dozen ideas for articles on loads of different subjects and when I can’t find anywhere else for that content it goes here
I’ve toyed with the idea of guest posting for others instead, maybe that would be a better idea?
|Paul B
November 27, 2009
It’s not the indexing that’s the problem (easily sorted as you suggest), it’s the anchor from your other pages to it. Just having that link on every page (even no followed) reduces the overall value of your other links. So you need a Privacy Policy but linking to it impacts the other links on your site. Using this approach allows you to link to it using a followed link and have some of that link juice flow back to your other pages.
|Dave
December 5, 2009
The FTC also likes clear and conspicuous terms. This means that they don’t want it where someone will not easily find it… like at the very bottom of a page. Chances are they will read the content and then hopefully take the action or an action that you want them to take without going to the bottom of the page to see if there is a privacy policy on your page.
For instance, if you have a signup form on your page for an email list or a contest entry they want the tos/privacy policy of that list or contest right underneath the enter email box so that it is clear and conspicuous…they don’t want it somewhere the consumer is unlikely to notice it.
They will however in most cases I assume be happy with a privacy policy on every page even if it is at the bottom of the page. If you were a bigger company I’d certainly advise you to be more conspicuous with the privacy policy/tos link.
Dave’s 2 cents CDN… 1.90 american
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