My WordPress How-to: YARPP – Yet Another Related Post Plugin

Imagine yourself as a new visitor to a website. A couple of your friends have talked about it and you decided to check this one out. You head to the home page and find a few posts that look interesting. Enjoying those posts, you jump into the archive to find more. Overall, the website has great information but about 75% of the content is about subjects that don’t interest you. After looking at 15 of the over 100 pages of archives and only finding a few posts you are interested about, you get a call and close out the browser. If only you had some way to identify other posts related to the ones you liked.

Keeping readers attention and interest can be difficult at times. You can be the best writer on the web, but if the subjects you are writing about don’t interest the reader at that time, you will lose him or her. To help keep the readers interest, writers will often link back to previous posts within the context of a new post when appropriate. That works great if you can fit in those links but sometimes, you just can’t. In those times, you need some way to identify posts that are similar to the one you are writing. You need YARPP.

YARPP – The Related Post Plugin

YARPP, or Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, is a WordPress plugin that identifies and links to your posts that are similar. For example, let’s you write about bamboo fishing rods about once a month but mostly about photography. The people who find and read your posts about the fishing rods may not be that interested in photography. With YARPP and the other related post plugins, readers can find the other fishing rod posts you have written right there on the bottom of the the post they are reading. All with no manual input from you.

Here is a screen shot of a typical YARPP post list from this site:

You will notice the numbers at the end of the post; those are the match scores for the individual posts. The higher the score, the better the match. In the settings of the plugin, you can choose a threshold score so that there is a lower limit for matches. You may have to adjust this threshold and some of the other settings to get the results you want, but from experience, this plugin works much better the more content you have. If that content is similar, it works even better. From the above results, you can see the first four are WordPress how-to posts about different topics, just like this one so the plugin is doing a good job so far.

Settings

There are few settings to worry with setting up in YARPP and they are divided up into three sections: Relatedness Options, Display Options For Your Website, and Display Options for RSS.

Relatedness Options

The Relatedness Options is the place where you would set the threshold for matches and control what parts of the posts the plugin will use to determine the match score. The available settings are as follows (with the options particular to that setting underneath) :

Match threshold – Controls the minimum score needed to display a related post
Titles– Using the options below, YARPP can use the titles of the posts, pages, etc when calculating the match score
- Do Not Consider
- Consider
- Consider Extra Weight
Bodies– Similar to Titles, YARPP can use the content in the bodies of the posts, pages, etc when calculating the match score
- Do Not Consider
- Consider
- Consider Extra Weight
Categories– YARPP can use the Categories of the posts to generate a better related post list
- Do Not Consider
- Consider
- Consider Extra Weight
- Require At Least One Category In Common
- Require More Than One Category In Common
Tags– Similar to the Categories, YARPP can use the Tags of the posts to generate a better related post list
- Do Not Consider
- Consider
- Consider Extra Weight
- Require At Least One Tag In Common
- Require More Than One Tag In Common
Display results from all post types
Show only previous posts

As you can see, there are a bunch of possible setting combinations that will allow you to tweak for the results you are satisfied with and a related post list that is more relevant to your readers. In the image, you can see my settings. I have been happy with the match scores and posts selected by the plugin, I have left many of the settings as they were when I started.

UPDATE: Due to the writing of this post, I have decided to change two of the settings; Display results from all post types (initially not checked) and Show only previous posts (initially checked). As an experiment, I decided to check the Display results from all post types option so that YARPP will generate a related post list of different types. By checking the option, YARPP should display all types of content (pages, posts, etc) on any post type. As for the Show only previous posts, I am unchecking it. I hope that this change will add a much larger body of available content when matched are being calculated.

Display Options For Your Website

This section of settings control the structure of the related post list that will display on your site. There are many available options available, so let’s get started.

Automatically display related posts? – Select this option to have you related post list inserted automatically or modify your template to insert your related posts exactly where you want them
Maximum number of related posts
Display using a custom template file
Before / after related entries – Code and words to display before the related post list
Before / after each related entry – Code and words to display after each related post
Show excerpt? – Select if you want a short section of the posts to be displayed. Typically, an excerpt is about 200 characters long
Order results – Used to select how to display the results; by score, date, or title.
Default display if no results – What happens if there are no results that meet the match threshold? This setting allows you to be creative when there is no related post list to display.

Display options for RSS

The settings in this section are similar to the previous section, Display Options For Your Website. Here they are:

Display related posts in feeds? – Used to include or omit the related post list in your RSS feed
Display related posts in the descriptions? – Displays the related post list in the RSS feed description
Maximum number of related posts
Display using a custom template file
Before / after related entries – Similar to the previous section, used to display words and code before the related post list
Before / after each related entry – Similar to the previous section, used to display words and code after each related post
Show excerpt? – Similar to the previous section, select if you want a short section of the posts to be displayed. Typically, an excerpt is about 200 characters long
Order results – Used to select how to display the results; by score, date, or title.
Default display if no results – What happens if there are no results that meet the match threshold? This setting allows you to be creative when there is no related post list to display. You can duplicate the display from the website or shake things up a bit for flavor.

There you have it. YARPP is a great plugin that will save you time, add value for your readers, and provide you with internal links to other pages in your site, possibly decreasing bounce rates. It is a useful tool that you should consider adding to your WordPress site.

Are you using YARPP or another related post plugin? Leave me a comment and let’s discuss the results