What is the purpose of the Meta section

What is the main page? Where is the Meta section?
Do you mean your site or this site (www.ads-software.com)?

Do you mean the one typically on the sidebar displaying list of links? If that’s the case, it’s there for arbitrary miscellaneous links. It’s not necessary to have this section called Meta in a website, you can name this list of links any name you like, or just do without it.

Ok

Then I will take it away.

Now I want to create a linklist. Maybe the Meta is good for renaming into a linklist? Or would you recommend that I do a linklist in “pages” instead?

This is not the subject if this post but I have heard creating a linklist can hurt the SEO of the blog. Is this true or should it be taken with a grain of salt?

(When I say linklist I mean a list over websites that I find useful that are related to my subject)

The meta widget is a handy list of default links for showing on a default site. The main reason for it is that it contains a link to login to the site, because some new users don’t know how to do that without a link.

You can remove it if you like. It is not an important thing to have.

Thanks Otto for clearing that up, I forgot the “Meta Widget”.

RE: list of links in page or in sidebar

My take on this is to do what makes sense. Links in sidebar is site-wide, so it should be something important to the site, while links in a page are specific to the content in that particular page. What to avoid is having way too many links in one place

If I were to have a while lot of links to display on a website, I would categorize them in group and create a page for each group. On the page, I would make sure to include introductory text for each link or for the whole group. So links on the sidebar will lead to each page containing links.

ok guys thanks.

Interesting paulwpxp. Do you have an example of how this is done that you could link to?

Do you mean keeping the links in “categories” instead of pages or something?

RE: Do you mean keeping the links in “categories” instead of pages or something?

No, I didn’t mean category in the sense of post or page taxonomy as in standard WordPress category/tag. I mean we mentally categorize all the links we have into groups based on its context or relevance.

Suppose our website will have total of 30 links to other websites related to cats, dogs, family and friends. Instead of having 30 links in sidebar (or footbar for modern one column design), we put in only 3 links there.

For this example, in our sidebar (or footbar) we have 3 links each of which is a url to normal WordPress page that we created and named it properly.

• “For cat lovers” https://example.com/my-cats-page
• “For dog lovers” https://example.com/my-dogs-page
• “Hello my friends” https://example.com/my-people-page

On each page (normal WordPress page) write up an introductory paragraph followed by list of links to websites related to the subject of that page. Or we can do it better by writing up introductory paragraph for each link. And now that WP 5.3 has this new Group Block, we can fancy up the design on this page easily.

The reason to have introductory paragraph for each link (or one main paragraph for list of links) is to avoid our website being recognized by search engine as “Link Farm” which can hurt the SEO. And also it gives the context to site visitors, for people to understand why these links are there.