Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Review

When someone visits your website, you don’t want them to leave after reading just one page. YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) uses an ingenious algorithm to determine which posts and pages are the most relevant to the current post. By giving your visitors the opportunity to easily read related content on your website, you can increase your visitors’ time on your website, and thus improve the chances of a purchase or the visitor contacting you. With YARPP, you don’t have to figure out which posts and pages are the most relevant – you can just let the plugin do it automatically.

Furthermore, the internal links generated by YARPP help your site’s SEO. By linking your posts to related content, you’re essentially “voting” for that content, and helping those posts and pages rank for their respective keywords.

How Does It Work?

YARPP uses a complex algorithm to examine the content on your website posts and pages. It looks at your title, headings, body content, categories, and tags to determine “relatedness.” Matches are given different weight, depending on where they are found.

Options and Customization

There are a variety of options, including:

  • Include/exclude pages with your list of related posts
  • Exclude posts with certain categories or tags
  • Limit the list of related posts to recent posts within a specific timeframe
  • Limit the list of related posts to those published before the given post
  • Increase/decrease the weight of certain components in the algorithm, such as titles, body text, categories, and tags
  • Specify the maximum number of related items to return
  • Specify a minimum threshold for “relatedness,” so if there are not enough related posts and pages to return, the unrelated ones will not be displayed
  • Customize the styles used to display the list of related posts
  • Display an excerpt for each related post
  • Manually add the list of related posts with a shortcode, instead of automatically adding the list to all posts

Applications

The most common location for displaying your related posts is at the bottom of every post. You will find an example of this at the bottom of every EfficientWP post, including this one.

You can also use YARPP in a widget. Related pages and posts are displayed on the left-hand side in a widget labeled “Related Articles.” If the visitor is reading an article, and it is not exactly what he or she is looking for, or one of the related articles catches their eye, it can prove to be very useful.

For more information about the plugin, visit http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/.

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