Ever visited a blog and on the home, or index, page, seen how the posts there show a few lines then a ‘Read More’ link? In WordPress that’s the effect of using the ‘more’ tag, and there’s two reasons why you should use it too.
Reason 1 - Your New Visitors Will Thank You
New visitors to your blog are usually attracted by the promise of an interesting post discovered via a search engine or a social networking site like StumbleUpon. If your post does indeed live up to its promise of relevant, fresh content then its likely your new visitor will click back to the home page and check out a few other posts. And if they like what they see, there’s a good chance you have a new subscriber to your feed.
That’s a good thing.
But like all things Internet-related, you only have a short time to sustain that visitor’s attention. When you use the ‘more’ tag your home page shows only the lines above it - it’s like a summary of the rest of the post.
Most blog authors don’t change the Wordpress default setting of displaying the ten most recent posts on the home page, so if your posts are wordy there’s a lot of scrolling to see your content when you don’t use the ‘more’ tag.
In summary, it makes it real easy for visitors who are unfamiliar with your blog to decide whether they’re interested enough to subscribe.
Reason 2 - Minimise Duplicate Content Penalties from Search Engines
Search engines don’t like duplicate content. And WordPress, in its default configuration, does indeed produce duplicate content on your blog. What happens is that a single post can be referenced at least six ways:
- Directly, via its permalink URL
- Indirectly, via the home page
- Indirectly, via the date archive page
- Indirectly, via the category archive page
- Indirectly, via the author archive page (if your blog features multiple authors)
- Indirectly, via the tag page (if your blog uses the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin)
Each of these will reference the same post via a different URL.
A few days ago I wrote a post on using robots.txt to control search engine indexing behaviour, and since then I’ve learned of a plugin that does the same thing using metadata (I wrote about that one in this post). However neither method can neuter the issue of content indexed on your home page (the second bullet point above).
So how does this relate to the ‘more’ tag? What it does is effectively limit the text that’s displayed on your home page. By keeping this text summary small (and including your key phrases, by the way) you can avoid any chance of duplicate text being recognised, plus get a few key terms in there for search engine joy.
8 responses so far ↓
1 WAH(web)Mommy // Jan 10, 2008 at 11:08 pm
This is an intersting topic - one I have been debating with myself for a while. So far, I’m still going with the default to show the full post on the front page (rather than having the “more” link).
So far I’ve done this from a convenience standpoint. When I’m reading blogs, I find it easier to get to scroll and read a full article right there on the home page rather than having to click every time in order to read everything.
On the other hand… most likely a user isn’t going to be interested in ALL of the articles on a blog… Having an excerpt lets them glance at more articles on the home page to quicker find the ones that interest them.
Of course, that assumes you have a great title and introductory paragraph, lol.
So, I’m still on the fence here, but it’s good to see there are valid reasons for the more tag from an SEO point of view, as well.
Thanks!
2 Mark // Jan 14, 2008 at 10:10 am
@ WAH: You raise a good point about titles! In fact I have this in my Moleskine as a post topic, since there are three “titles” (not one) you need to worry about with WP. I will do this one through the week.
Thanks for stopping by!
3 Tom // Jan 17, 2008 at 1:59 am
My big hesitation about the more tag is that it seems to result in a partial RSS feed. I want to send out a full feed, as I much prefer a full feed. Any suggestions for how to make the more tag not give a partial feed?
4 Roman // Feb 4, 2008 at 5:48 pm
@Tom,
You’ll need a plugin which eliminates the tag from your feeds, thus delivering a complete one; whilst retaining the tag for your viewers on your page.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I just found:
http://cavemonkey50.com/code/full-feed/
Cheers,
R
5 Mark // Feb 5, 2008 at 9:38 am
@Roman,
Thanks very much for the heads-up on this. Just checked it out, looks great!
6 Benjamin Baxter // Feb 5, 2008 at 11:53 am
What about WordPress.com users? Are we up a creek?
http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/
7 Mark // Feb 14, 2008 at 3:10 pm
@Benjamin: Not at all, the more button is there on wordpress.com posts as well.
8 Publish Your Blog Posts Direct From Microsoft Word | Stratify Pty Ltd // Apr 17, 2008 at 8:59 pm
[…] I like to use the ‘More’ tag in my posts, which lets me put an extract on the home page and the full article on the post’s […]
Leave a Comment