WordPress Possibly Related Posts Leaving Bloggers up in Arms
Categories: WordPress
Written By: 
Kevin
A feature that was recently released on WordPress.com blogs without any warning, which displays links to “possibly related” blog posts. However, because there weren’t any good methods implemented for controlling the sources of links shown, it left many bloggers using the service turning the feature completely off.
The main intent for including these links was to help drive a “5-10% increase in traffic overnight” on your blog, when links to your posts are shown on blogs that are in the same category.
The “feature” can be found by going into Design > Extras of your blog, where it can be disabled. If you remove it, your posts will not be shown on others’ blogs.
Currently, WordPress has formed a partnership with Sphere to deliver the content on the blogs.
Sphere states:
This is really cool for Wordpress because it’s one of the first examples of a network of their size and scope leveraging the power of their community to circulate content between blogs. It’s also great for individual bloggers, because it gives them the opportunity to highlight and syndicate their content, both internally on their own sites and across the broader Wordpress platform.
While the feature may benefit some bloggers who did not otherwise see much traffic, the function garners some problems in the sense that it is forced on bloggers, instead of an opt-in choice and creates added clutter in the already cluttered footer of many bloggers’ posts. In most cases, the links shown are not completely relevant to the blog they are placed on and result in wasted space on the blog.
In addition, with the three million plus blogs that are using WordPress, a major search engine/backlinking problem may be created as it will be nearly impossible to track where all the links are going, on which blogs they are displayed on, and how “related” they are to the posts.
While at this point, it is an experimental feature, Matt Mullenweg has stated:
In the next few days we’ll have an update that allows you to block specific blogs from showing up, and eventually that setting will also apply to the tag surfer, blog surfer, and top blogs so when you block a blog you should never see it again.
and
Right now this is just for English blogs, but we’re working on the technology to roll this out for every language we support. We’ll also be adding some ways for you to tweak the results to your liking.
Obviously, it looks as though this may be a feature that stays and will be in continued development. Right now, it needs many improvements to coexist with the honest bloggers and those that produce poor quality blogs - prevention of their content on the people that run an honest blog operation.
WordPress.org and Multiple User (MU) bloggers will soon have to decide whether the feature is best for them, or just to avoid it, as it is expected to roll out to their blogs, possibly in an upcoming update. Once again, I feel as though the blogger should decide whether the feature should be adopted, not the option of Automattic/WordPress development team. There are already dozens of plugins and widgets that allow you to show related posts from your own blog or your favorite blogs, and are often just as relevant as the feature recently released.
If you are on WordPress.com and want to remove the function, please see Lorelle’s blog.
Continuing the Discussion
Andy Beard - WordPress Possibly Related Posts with Sphere
Internet Duct Tape - Fixing the WordPress.com Possibly Related Feature
WordPress Forum Posts
- Possibly Related and Mature Blogs
- I Don’t Want Possibly Related Links on My Blogs
- Possibly Related Posts
| 2.5 |
April 27th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Yeah, I can see where this would be annoying. Essentially, you could spend a lot of time on your blog making it work exactly how you want, and may never even LOOK at the front end of it for a long time. If suddenly my blog changed without my knowing, I’d be pretty pissed. I’ll stick to self-hosted WP blogs.
April 27th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
This is likely one of the top features that bloggers would rather not see on their blog, as they already have the choice of adding similar tools to achieve the same effect.
From one of the blogs I read about this issue, it looks like it may become a part of all WordPress blogs - MU and self-hosted (MU), possibly in a later version.
I guess only time will what happens as a result of this ‘feature’ and how Automattic plans on improving it.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Yesterday I used a tip from a Wordpress forum to change the CSS for the “Possibly related ” text, so that it made clear that these were chosen by the WP computer, and not endorsed by myself.
This seemed to allow the best of both worlds - part of a linking community, but not getting responsibility for things I didn’t post.
Today that bit of CSS code doesn’t work. Oh well.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Hi all - very active conversation -
The goal of the new feature is to create opportunities for readers to discover more content that is related to what you’re writing about. We’ve included content from your archives, from other WordPress.com blogs and for Mainstream Media sites (MSM).
Like any technology, we’re making lots (and lots) of tweaks on the fly to get the filters properly tuned. While subjective, we’ve been successful in making these tweaks on a large number of partner sites (www.sphere.com) so I’m hopeful (with a little patience and goodwill), we’ll make improvements as we go along. In the meantime, you’re input is really critical for us to make those improvements, so please keep sending.
Tony
April 28th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
@ George - Because you are on the .com/free version of WordPress, I believe that it is much easier for them to release updates or changes, which typically benefits the community. So, fixes may have been made, which no longer allow the particular code you used.
@ tony conrad -Thanks for clearing up the purpose of the feature. It may not have been the fact that other (sometimes unrelated) blogs were shown, but that it was automatically added to the blogs and didn’t allow full control of what sites were shown.
The feature does have a lot of possibilities for many bloggers, as they will possibly be able to get some active readers/visitors from the related posts, blogs that they normally wouldn’t have discovered.
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May 26th, 2008 at 4:52 am
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