Limit Your WordPress Tag Cloud To Help Control PageRank Flow

Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on December 2, 2009

Have you ever wondered how to limit the number of tags displayed in the sidebar when using the default tag cloud widget in WordPress?

The default tag limit is fairly large; 45 tags in the latest version of WordPress. That can definitely affect your PageRank flow and link-to-text ratio some. A bit more useful on smaller blogs with less PageRank to spread around, however the net affect can still be helpful on high authority blogs.

I don’t actually use post tags on this blog (for no specific reason), but when I was trying to figure it out for another one of my blogs I thought for sure there would be a ton of how-tos on this issue considering Google Suggest displayed limit tag cloud wordpress in the search box as I typed it in. Nevertheless, I didn’t find good information.

I ended up having to figure it out by testing the code myself since I already new where to limit the font-size in the tag cloud, I figured it had to be close. Close it was, actually on the same line of code.

Find this file yourdomain.com/wp-includes/category-template.php and download it to your local machine using ftp or a similar protocol.

Then open it and find this code around line 525:

function wp_tag_cloud( $args = ” ) {
$defaults = array(
‘smallest’ => 8, ‘largest’ => 12, ‘unit’ => ‘pt’, ‘number’ => 45,

Change the 45 to equal the desired number of tags. As of this post I am using the most recent version of WordPress which is WordPress version 2.8.6.

After backing up your live file, just upload the modified category-template.php file back to your web server. Now the desired number of tags should be displayed.

Unfortunately, It appears you have to fix this every time you update WordPress, that is, unless anyone knows of a better way to do it?

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