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I found a useful plugin for hosted Wordpress Blogs today, developed by Lucia over at Big Bucks Blogger. The plugin enables you to hide any or all of your post categories, in-post, in the sidebar list or in the blog archives. This plugin is easy to install - just upload to the wp-content folder, ‘plugins’ on your web host control panel. Then log in to your Wordpress blog to activate the plugin in one click of the mouse. Then under ‘options’ you can choose which categories your blog visitors will see. This plugin is also useful to prevent your sidebar becoming clogged up with hundreds of categories that do not help your visitors find the posts they want to read.

Why would you want to hide the ’sponsored posts’ categories? Well, there is nothing ‘black hat’ about this but is is very useful to you if you want to monetize your blog or website. Many advertisers ask that sponsored posts should not be identified individually. Instead they require the blogger to display a link to a disclosure policy and that complies with all the ethical and legal requirements of disclosure.org.

Th reason we assign categories - or ‘tags’ - to blog posts is to show the search engines and blog ranking sites, like Technorati, relevant fresh content that their readers can find easily and tagging your posts with the word ’sponsored’ or the name of the ‘Paid to Post’ site does not help with that. In fact, tagging the posts in this way could reduce the effectiveness of the backlinks that the advertiser has paid for. This clever plugin even allows you to prevent the category from appearing in your blog archives as well, so the links to the advertiser’s site are likely to prove more valuable for their SERPs results.

I searched for ages to find a way of hiding the categories before I found Lucia’s awesome plugin - you can save time and hide your Wordpress categories by downloading the Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin

UPDATE - this Wordpress Plugin has not been updated and maintained to work with the latest Wordpress software.  Please see my Wordpress Sponsored Categories Update report to find out more.