What is the best way to publish a post in Wordpress?

[roweis]

Hello!

Can anyone help me with the following question ? From the point of view of SEO is it better to publish the entire post on the home page of a WP blog, or is it better to use the "more" feature and publish only the first paragraph or the first two paragraphs on the home page, and then have a link at the end that says : "more on [post title]", which links to the permalink?

I am afraid that if the entire post is published on the home page, then you will have two pages with duplicate content ( home page and permalink ). But on the other hand, for visitors to the blog, it might be better to be able to read the entire post on the home page and not have to follow that link.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! So far I have been publishing only the first or first two paragraphs on the home page, with the link at the bottom ("more on [post title]"), but I am not certain if this is the best way to do it.

Thank you very much for your help,

Robert

[paisleygoddess]

I have been wondering about this as well. As a reader, I seldom click to continue reading, to me it is very annoying. I've kept full posts on my site, but would also like to know which is better.

Ash

[Jen]

Hi there, Robert/roweis - good question.

(Can you just pop over to the Introduce Yourself thread and tell us a bit about you, by the way?)

Well, you're going to have more than one page with the post content anyway - archives, tags, category pages, etc. - so it makes sense to me to do the Authority Blogger thang and prioritize the interests of your readers.

Ash/paisleygoddess is in the majority when she says she seldom clicks to read on from a summary - most people feel the same, and it takes a brilliant opening to overcome that. Many people (myself included) are also reluctant to subscribe to truncated RSS, and will only give GReader space to full feeds - so that's another consideration.

Readers will always trump SEO jigging, in the long term.
IMHO.

[roweis]

Dear Jen and Ash,

Thank you very much for your comments, but now I am even more confused than before, because I posted the same question in another forum, and someone replied it's a good thing to use the "more" feature and not to "clutter" the home page! So there is no consensus, but I do agree with the statement about truncated RSS, so probably it's best to have the full post on the home page. In that case, if an average post is 400 to 500 words long, what do you think would be the ideal number of posts that should appear on the home page? Perhaps no more than 3 ?

Thank you very much for your help,

Robert

[Sue C]

Robert, I use the excerpted post because my theme wouldn't look good with full posts. I honestly think it's more a function of the theme itself that decides. And I like to keep an amount of posts on a page that kind of ends where the sidebar does, so there's not a lot of empty white space. Another blog I have does full posts, but they are shorter ones, so it looks good.

If your theme looks good with full posts, then go for it that way. But try to do no more than 3 or 4 so people don't have to scroll too much. A good way to cover that is to have other recent posts in the sidebar.

You haven't mentioned your blogging platform, so I'm not sure if you have that option, but to me that's the best way.

[Jen]

Thank you very much for your comments, but now I am even more confused than before, because I posted the same question in another forum, and someone replied it's a good thing to use the "more" feature and not to "clutter" the home page!

You're right - there is no consensus. That's because there is no single "right" way to set up your blog. But maybe I can help give a context for the conflicting answers you're getting in different places. Basically, it depends a lot on your goals as a blogger. Because this is the AB Forum, obviously the community tends to make assumptions about what those goals are...

Here, the focus is on the readers and on building a long-term faithful readership. Other forums may be more focussed on getting click-through traffic from SERPs - in the "make-money-online" model, subscribers and whether someone actually reads your writing would be of much less importance. Authority bloggers do acknowledge the importance of search engines in helping people to find your site, don't get me wrong! But with a difference emphasis - we aim to attract readers, not just clicks.

And that's why full-length feeds are strongly encouraged. It used to be that truncating the post on the front page would automatically truncate the feed as well, and that's a big no-no. Fortunately, there are plugins to cure that now! Depending on post length, page design, etc., full posts on the front page may or may not be appropriate... I will occasionally use the 'more' tag when I've been terribly long-winded, I confess. But the bottom line is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to get the info they want.

Clear as mud?

If in doubt, why not ask your readers which style they would prefer? A little poll in the sidebar, maybe... and it would be fascinating to hear the results!

Jen

[guioconnor]

Well, you're going to have more than one page with the post content anyway - archives, tags, category pages, etc. - so it makes sense to me to do the Authority Blogger thang and prioritize the interests of your readers.

Well, is not exactly so. You can add a meta tag on archive/tag/category pages so Search engines won't index it and avoid duplicate content, this is the line in question

<meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow' />

And this is how you do it in Wordpress

<?php
    if((is_single() || is_category() || is_page() || is_home()) && (!is_paged())){
        // <!-– ok google, index me! –->
    }else{
        // <!–- google, please ignore - thanks! -–>
        echo "<meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow' />\n ";
    }
?>

And of course, you could just remove is_home() from the if statement and then the index won't be indexed as well, but to a large extent this has highly undesirable side effects. You do want your home to be indexed and that is why is much trickier.

But having said that, Jen is right and ultimately you must address your reader needs, because that is what is going to create a faithful reader base and more backlinks which are also good for SEO.

[Jen]

Well, is not exactly so. You can add a meta tag on archive/tag/category pages so Search engines won't index it and avoid duplicate content, this is the line in question

Gui is quite right, of course, Robert. (I've missed having our most helpful designer around here lately!) I'm sure you're a blogger who'd be comfortable with following Gui's instructions, Robert, but it just occurred to me to wonder if there could be plugins of some sort to help out newer bloggers - or even people who'd just rather not look at the inner workings of their site... Anyone know of a plugin to automate the robots.txt idea, and let a blogger pick-and-choose what pages to have crawled and indexed?

Search engines don't always pay strict attention to our instructions about what their robots should or should not do - but at least that should be enough to keep you out of any duplicate-content penalty (in theory). And duplicate content was your original concern, after all, in wondering about whether to publish full text or summaries on the front page. We may have drifted just a tiny bit off-topic into blogger-philosophy there!

[guioconnor]

Gui is quite right, of course, Robert. (I've missed having our most helpful designer around here lately!)!

Lol, yes, I've been mostly offline because I'm 1000 Km northwest of my own online environment, but I'll be back soon, or rather, I'll bring my environment here.

I'm sure you're a blogger who'd be comfortable with following Gui's instructions, Robert, but it just occurred to me to wonder if there could be plugins of some sort to help out newer bloggers!

Now, that's an excellent idea. The snippet of code I gave on my previous post can easily be transformed into a plugin if it hadn't been done yet.

I'm quite busy at the moment, otherwise I'd do it myself, but is an interesting challenge if someone wants to challenge him/herself to a first wordpress plugin.

[louisliem]

Maybe you can position yourself as the reader. Put crawlers second. As a reader to your blog, how would you like to read your posts? excerpted or full? If you prefer full, do so.
However, a 600 words post may not look so good on the main page, so I think your readers won't mind clicking the "read more" button as long as you're writing something interesting.
don't worry too much about dupes. there'll always a solution for those bots since they're algorithmic and easier to predict. i suggest we prioritize human readers over bots.