Only one post
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I was recently advised by a staff member that I had only one post, Story Index. The rest of my blog consists of story pages. When I look up my site in Reader, I see just the one post, Story Index, and the words Name of story under it. I would like the names of my stories, now 13, to be shown. Do I have to change them to posts to be seen on the Reader search page?
As pages alone, they don’t show up. If I changed them all to posts, how would that affect the fact that some stories are multi-chapter, with 1, 2, or even 3 pages? Take a look at my blog, please. The last staff member didn’t even look at it, because she suggested I get rid of my Story Index page, a page I have labored over to link to individual stories. It’s my Table of Contents for my whole blog!
Let me recap: I have a blog of multi-chapter stories. On the Reader search page, it shows only Story Index (a post) and Name of story. I want the actual titles of my stories to show on the search page. Do I have to change them to posts? How will that affect my multiple pages within each story? Will all of those pages have to become posts, too? Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
WordPress sites have two basic types of content: posts and pages. Posts are meant for any content that you publish/update on an ongoing basis. They appear in a feed on your site with the most recent post always at the top, and that feed can be followed via the Reader and third party feed readers. If someone subscribes to your site via email, they also get an email notification each time you publish a new post, and you can configure your site to automatically share new posts to your social media accounts.
Pages are meant for static content. This is content like an About page, a contact page, a page containing an index of posts on your site, etc. In other words, any content that is permanent and that isn’t changed or updated regularly. Pages don’t appear in a feed, and cannot be followed in a feed reader or via email. Typically you’d add pages to your site menu so that the information they contain is easy for any visitor to find. When displaying your site in online search results, most search engines (including Google) will give more weight to content in posts than content in pages.
Now to your specific questions:
On the Reader search page, it shows only Story Index (a post) and Name of story. I want the actual titles of my stories to show on the search page. Do I have to change them to posts?
The Reader only displays content in your site’s feed, and only indexes content in your site’s feed for Search. So if you want your stories to show in the Reader, they need to be published as posts, not pages.
How will that affect my multiple pages within each story?
You can add pagination to a Post, just like you can with a Page, so you can keep your stories as they are currently, that is, a single Post with each chapter on its own page within the Post.
Will all of those pages have to become posts, too?
That’s really up to you.
If it were my site, I’d publish each chapter as a separate post. This has some advantages:
1) People are more likely to finish reading a short, single-page post, than a long multi-page on in a sitting.
2) By breaking up each story into multiple shorter posts, you can spread a story out over a week, rather than posting the entire story at once. This way you ensure reader keep coming back to your site for new content, rather than visiting once, reading the story that brought them there, and leaving – if people keep coming back, it’s more likely they’ll start engaging with some of the other content you’ve published.
3) You already have enough content to keep your blog going for months, with very little ongoing effort required on your part: Converting your existing pages to posts will take some work, but again if it were me, while creating the posts I wouldn’t republish them all right away. Instead, I’d schedule them to publish on a steady schedule over the coming months. Then sit back and enjoy the readers coming in. (You can do this while keeping your multi-page posts, but if each chapter was its own post, you’d have significantly more posts, and can maintain this for far longer.)
4) It will be better for SEO. More posts = more content for search engines to index. It also means your site will always have something recent for them to index. If you publish everything at once, your site will very quickly lose its position in search rankings again, as search engines will decide the content is now outdated. But if there’s a new post or three every week, search engines know the site is active, and the content is recent, so it must be relevant.
5) It will make your site more discoverable in the WordPress.com Reader. Just like search engines, the Reader also gives preference to recent content. So if you publish everything at once, it will appear in the Reader, you’ll get a very brief influx of visitors, and then more recent content will push yours down in the feed and people just won’t find it any more. But if there’s a new post every week, it means there’s opportunity each week for someone new to discover your site through the Reader.
But I reiterate, that’s what I would do. There’s nothing wrong at all with keeping your chapters as pages in a single post as you do now. It just means your posts will be much longer, and you’ll have fewer posts to publish :)
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Thank you! Those are wonderful suggestions. I have one more question. On the Reader search page, my site looks great. One caveat: my Gmail address is listed along with the title, Stories of the Rat Patrol. I want to remove my Gmail address. I’ve tried edit, but to no avail. How I remove it in the post title? Thanks!
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It’s showing your email, because that’s what you have set as the public display name for your account in your WordPress.com account settings.
Go to https://wordpress.com/me/ and update the Public Display Name to change that.
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I took out the email address showing in the public profile, but now it’s showing another email address, my personal one. Help! I need to remove them from public view. Thanks!
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Hello there,
Many thanks for getting back to us.
I can’t say that I’m seeing the email there. Can you paste a link of where you’re seeing this please?
Many thanks.
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