Hiding the Zemanta Related Posts WordPress Plugin Link

Back when I migrated my blog over to WordPress last year, I had read the tips about how you should set up links to other pages on your site in order to limit user dropoff. In the spirit of that, I looked for a plugin on WordPress that would automatically set that up and maintain it for me. I came across Zemanta Related Posts and thought it was suitable for what I was looking to do. I’m still happy with the solution (and my 2% retention rate via related posts), but I found that I wasn’t a huge fan of the link that Zemanta put on my blog entries (see the bottom left of the image).

Back when I first noticed it, I figured there had to be some kind of setting to turn it off, but I soon realized that wasn’t the case. I ended up editing the actual source code of the plugin to delete the link. You can see the culprit below under the ‘display_zemanta_linky’ condition (the value of which deceptively isn’t set anywhere that you can modify).

While that worked, I started to realize every time Zemanta updated the plugin it would overwrite my changes with a new version of the file that would include the link again. As such, I had to remember to keep making this change.

After the most recent update, I realized that I could just hide the link with CSS. Fortunately the plugin has some pseudo name-spacing of the CSS classes that keeps the path pretty unique, so it shouldn’t affect anything else on the site. Instructions on how to get to the page where you edit your CSS are here.

/* hide Zemanta link */
div.wp_rp_footer a.wp_rp_backlink {
  display: none;
}