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Simple related posts with Jetpack 2.9

related-postsIt was just a few weeks ago that we were telling you about Jetpack 2.8 and the excellent Markdown feature and now Jetpack 2.9 has been released with another great tool for your website — related posts.

There have been related posts plugins for a long time, some better than others. The biggest problem with all of them has been overhead; it takes a lot of processing power to determine the best related posts for a particular piece of content. Jetpack has solved this by using the powerful WordPress.com back end to manage these posts, rather than having your server do the work.

Having related posts can be a great feature to add to your site. It’ll give Google one more way to find and index your posts, but more importantly it’ll help keep readers on your site for longer periods of time by showing them additional content that they might like.

The details

Because they’ve connected it with WordPress.com, the plugin can do some neat things. In addition to offloading the processing of the posts to the powerful WordPress.com servers, it also will automatically resize the featured image to match the others on your page using their “Photon” service.

There are three other small details to pay attention to:

  1. Your blog must have at least 10 published posts for related content to appear (to avoid simply cross-linking posts with one another).
  2. Related content is automatically generated based on the content of the post and any tags or categories if they exist.
  3. This feature uses the WordPress.com infrastructure and mirrors your content there for indexing. If you see intermittent issues only affecting certain posts, you can request a reindex of your site under Jetpack > Related Posts > Learn More.

Getting started

Enabling the feature is as simple as clicking the “Activate” button in the “Related Posts” module of your Jetpack. From there you can configure a few simple options.

Check it out for yourself by looking at the related posts at the bottom of this post, then go fire it up on your blog. For more, check out the details on the Jetpack site.

About the Author

Mickey Mellen

Co-Founder and Technical Director

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