Why You Should Manually Curate Your Related Posts

It’s important to support your content with what Google calls “secondary content” or “supporting content”. This is distinct from the main content or MC of a website, that directly deals with the topic in the heading or title. A good example of this supporting content is “Related Posts”, and you often see them on the sidebar, or below the article. There are many ways of adding these posts, but in this article, I’ll tell you why I think it’s better to curate the related posts by yourself, without relying on an algorithm to do so.

Why Related Posts Plugins are Complicated

For as long as I’ve maintained a blog, I’ve struggled with the complexities of related posts. These are plugins that index your site, pick up on keywords or taxonomies, and try and recommend posts algorithmically. There are two key issues:

Relevance

A computer program can never understand your site the way you do. Regardless of the proximity of keywords and categories or tags, you will always be able to find better-related posts than an algorithm. This is because only you can understand the context of certain articles as they relate to other articles.

Moreover, an article might fit together well as a related post even though it doesn’t share the same keywords or categories! This is because they might share the same intent as the original, and be part of a chain that leads the buyer on the journey towards a conversion. Or maybe it’s just something you think the reader of the current article will be interested in, even though it doesn’t share a keyword or a category with the main article.

Algorithmic lists can never approach this level of understanding of intent.

Computational Power

Plugins that index your site and generate related plugin posts can suck up CPU power on your server whenever you publish or update a post. I’ve faced this problem with several “related posts” plugins. The most sophisticated ones use complex algorithms for understanding context with in-depth keyword indexing and taxonomy. But especially on a shared hosting environment, this can fill up your quota of processing time, and slow your site down.

Some related posts plugins adopt a more simple, computationally light approach that gives a list of posts based on the category or tag. But by definition, these will be less relevant, and so of dubious usefulness.

3^rd Party Related Posts Plugins have Privacy/Speed Issues

There are other plugins like “Outbrain” or “Disqus” that generate related posts algorithmically on their servers and display them on your site, without using your server’s resources. Unfortunately, they come with a lot of additional baggage like privacy issues and additional code, logos, or their own ads that you might not want to associate with your site. I personally stay far away from them.

Manually Creating a Related Posts Section is Better

It might seem like an arduous job, but manually curating a list of 4 posts for each important article on your site is the best way to go about things. On my site WP-Tweaks.com, I lump together a bunch of related posts that all link to each other. This lets Google that I’m creating a topic cluster. Here’s a screenshot:

I’ve noticed a dramatic increase in time spent on my site, and greater engagement ever since I started doing this. It also allows you to “cluster” certain topics together in an informal way, and that’s good for SEO purposes. since Google likes to rank a bunch of related pages together that link back to each other.

Don’t Use the Sidebar for Related Posts

In line with the above point, I have a feeling Google doesn’t treat sidebar content very seriously. They treat links from sidebars like navigation links that don’t appear to carry a lot of semantic relevance. In addition, sidebar content is pushed to the bottom of the screen on mobile devices, and that’s how Google indexes the pages as well.

So if you want to get the maximum benefits from related posts, I suggest you place them directly within your content. Create a nice CSS block for related posts so that they stand out, and curate them manually.