Learn about Reader recommendations

The WordPress.com Reader recommends posts and websites based on editorial curation and algorithmic selection. In this guide, you’ll learn where recommended content appears and how it’s selected.

WordPress.com recommends content in Discover and throughout the Reader based on your activity and popular posts:

Discover highlights content across WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites. When you visit the Discover menu in the Reader, you’ll find the following tabs:

• Freshly Pressed: A curated selection of our team’s favorite content. Learn how we select content for Freshly Pressed.
• Recommended: Popular posts based on the tags you follow. If you don’t follow any tags, this defaults to the dailyprompt and WordPress tags.
• First posts: First-time posts from new bloggers.
• Tags: Posts that use popular tags.
• Latest: The latest posts related to tags you follow.

Recommended content also appears throughout the Reader:

• Reader Search: Displays the most popular content that matches your search criteria.
• Reader Post Recommendations: A feed of recommendations based on what you’ve recently liked or commented on, displayed in the Reader search page.
• Reader “More on WordPress.com” Related Posts: The most popular content on WordPress.com that’s similar to the current post, shown at the bottom of all posts in the Reader.

You can also display related posts on your own site. Related posts show only posts from within the same site and are selected based on the title, content, and engagement.

WordPress.com curates recommended content in two ways: through editorial selection for Freshly Pressed and through algorithmic recommendations based on user activity. In this section, you’ll learn how to increase your chances of appearing in each type of recommendation.

The WordPress.com team curates Freshly Pressed, featuring our favorite blog posts. We also publish user showcases, blogging resources, and interviews with people and organizations using WordPress.

You can increase your chances of being selected by following these best practices:

• Publish original content: Create your own work and give proper credit when referencing others. Use quotation marks or blockquotes when quoting, and include links to articles you mention.
• Embrace your voice and style: WordPress is a diverse global community. We publish personal musings, essays, fiction, poetry, comics, longreads, and more in various styles from subtle prose to opinionated commentaries to speculative fiction and academic research.
• Use images when possible: Add a featured image to your post, which creates a visually engaging element in the Reader. Find free images and media for your website.
• Make it easy to read: Break up your text and keep paragraphs short, and avoid distracting elements (like poor contrast colors and busy backgrounds). Check for typos.
• Add relevant meta data: Add relevant tags and categories, and craft clear headlines.

For inspiration, look at the other blogs featured in Freshly Pressed.

Reader recommendations use algorithms to automatically curate content based on user activity and post characteristics. The algorithms consider many factors when selecting recommendations:

• The title, content, tags, and categories of posts.
• Site information such as usernames, site names, and host names.
• Total number of likes and comments.
• Who has liked and commented on a post.
• Total number of subscribers.
• Who has subscribed to a site.
• How recently a post was published.
• How regularly or recently a site has posted.
• The content of what you’ve liked and commented on.
• Whether posts include links, images, or videos.
• How often a site has been rejected from Reader recommendations.

Your post likes and comments on other WordPress blogs influence recommendations. Take a look at your recent like activity to understand what similar content you might see. To prevent your comments from being included in recommendations, log out before commenting.

The recommendation algorithms filter out the following types of content:

• Sites identified as spam.
• Sites with mature content.
• Sites with objectionable content.
• Content not in your language.