Which Related Post Plugin Is Best?

One of the best ways you can increase the number of pages viewed per user on your blog is to add a Related Posts plugin.  The logic behind adding a Related Post plugin, is that if a reader makes it all the way to the end of a particular post, then it’s likely that they will want to read more posts on the same topic.

A year ago it was hard to find a good WordPress related posts plugin and I frequently had to email the one I used to readers as it wasn’t available for download anymore.  However, with the introduction of tags into the core WordPress build, it seems almost like a new Related Posts plugin is released every week.  These Related Posts plugins tend to work by displaying posts with similar tags, and I really think this is a really bad idea.

Why?  Well, for one they only match the tags that have been manually added to posts.  Even if you dilligently tag all your posts, you are not going to be able to add sufficient tags to aid the matching process without effectively writing your whole post again within the tags.  By all means add tags to your posts, but not to generate Related Posts.

This is why I use the Yet Another Related Posts plugin. Despite the name, this plugin is definitely not yet another plugin.  Not only does it search the fulltext of posts to look for related posts, but it also allows you to set a threshold limit for relevance.  If only two posts are found that exceed the threshold then only these two are shown, rather than displaying 5 posts where the other 3 have absolutely nothing in common with the post topic.

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