How do "related posts" work?
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I have many posts on my blog where there should be obvious “related posts” but in fact they are made up of 3 unrelated posts, which are not going to improve my bounce rate.
Can someone tell me if these related posts can be manipulated?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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It’s all magic and mirrors (automatic – you can’t fine tune things)
the link does not explain the details so I have flagged this for the staff – maybe they will share the secrets (sometimes companies such as Google will keep some details secret to prevent gaming the system)
I have related posts enabled on my site and seems to work fairly well
I also hard code related posts in the posts a bit (cross linking) to try and send visitors to Posts that have info that they might find helpful
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Have you consulted these support docs?
3. The feature works on almost all themes hosted by WordPress.com. For themes that already have a built-in related feature (Expound, Traveler, Opti, and Currents), the feature is disabled. https://en.support.wordpress.com/related-posts/view-all/#general-information
How to turn Related Posts on and off in the classic dashboard https://en.support.wordpress.com/related-posts/view-all/#related-posts-settings-in-the-classic-dashboard
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Hi there,
The Related Posts feature automatically generates links to what it detects as related content. There is not a way to manually change what content appears there.
If you don’t find the feature useful, you are welcome to turn it off. Some bloggers prefer to manually create links to posts they choose, instead.
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@rachelmcr – TT regurgitated the link I gave with instructions on turning Related Posts on and off which the OP already knows how to do – and your link is also the same as mine
The question the OP has, is how are the posts picked (the way the choice is made) – Tags, Categories or keywords etc. – or is it something top secret to try and keep people from gaming the system?
The selections on the OP’s site seems to be not relevant at times, does it have anything to do with the size of a site?
The feature seems to work Ok most of the time on my site – sometimes a bit strange at times, but I also hard code in links to other Posts at times (some knots for instance, to a knot that does the same job) to help visitors find related information
thanks
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The related posts feature looks at a number of elements within the post (including the post title, content, tags, and categories) and compares those to other posts to look for similarities. Tags, categories, and keywords are all things that will help signal that posts could be related, but they are just one piece and won’t guarantee that posts are selected as related posts. As you publish more posts it should get more accurate, but in the end if you are unhappy with the results or have particular related posts in mind, I’d recommend manually creating a list of related posts instead of using this feature.
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@rachelmcr – thanks for the update
The part that always amazes me is how the code picks the 12 or so keywords out of a Post of 1,200 words or so – but that seems to work on search engines so why not here I guess
thanks again for the help
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