Suggestions For "You may be interested in..."

[Gazley]

Hi there,

I use Kongondo's blog module and I want to start adding links at the bottom of the posts that reference other posts/resources that the reader may be interested in. I see this on many sites, particularly blog based sites.

I have the standard Blog module 'Categories' and 'Tags'. I have also added 'People' and 'Brands'. In this case, a single Blog post will always have a Category, it might have zero or more Tags, People or Brands associated with it. I'll refer to these labels as "categorizations" in the rest of this message.

Right there, I can obviously detect posts that are related by these four different categorizations. However, this suggests numerous questions!

What is the ideal total number of "related" posts? Should this number be split across all the categorizations? Should some categories be given more prominence/weight than others?

For example, if a post has a single category of "Fashion" and there are two tags, "Makeup" and "Hair" (specified in that order), would you give more priority to other posts tagged as "Makeup" rather than "Hair"?

Also, you (the post's Author) may want to specifically/manually select a Page(s) as a "You may be interested in" topic(s) if there is some connection that is not highlighted by the various additional categorizations.

For the additional structure in each page, I'm seeing the possibility of various additional Fields:

Maximum Number Of "You may be interested in" topics, irrespective of categorization

Maximum Number Of "You may be interested in" topics, per categorization (in total not exceeding the above)

List of categorizations to exclude on this particular post (the post may be in certain categorizations but for the purposes of related posts, you may not want all of the current posts' categorizations to be considered)

Specific author selected pages

Boolean to suggest that when there is specific author selected pages, the automatic selection of related categorized pages is suppressed.

Am I over thinking this?

Any thoughts, suggestions as to how the good folk on this forum approach this requirement?

Many thanks!

[rick]

In my opinion (and that is all that it is), your categorization issue is a bit more complex than just a simple tag reference.

For example, the general tag, 'Hair', as related to the 'Fashion' category, is not sufficient to determine a related post. The post context might be referencing hair-removal, while a related post based only on the tag 'Hair' could return a post with content relating to hair-coloring.

While this may seem trivial at first, consider how the google dertermines content ranking. It quite possibly could harm your seo results by having 'un-related' references.

Creating finer grained tags such as, Hair -> Removal, Hair -> Coloring, and Hair -> Styling, etc., would allow for more accurate relational results.

Also, by having a finer-grain tagging system, it would limit the number of related posts results. Personally, I would limit the results to three related references, regardless of the number returned.

/$.02 

[kongondo]

I read through this quickly so might have missed something. Just wanted to point out that Blog (since version 2.3.2) has a 'related' posts implementation: renderRelatedPosts(). Posts can be related by tags, categories or both. Have a read from here onwards and examples here. This is yet to find its way to the documentation, sorry.

Edited December 16, 2015 by kongondo

[Gazley]

Hi @rick

You make some really good points, particularly regarding fine-grained associations and their impact on SEO. I really appreciate your thoughts on this!