|
 
 
|
 About me Contact me |
|
|
About me Contact me |
|
Articles recently commented on:
Follow Mar Matthias on Twitter Follow Rev. Mother Theresa on Twitter
Website thumbnails generously provided by ShrinkTheWeb |
Related Articles: why are they so important? by Mar Matthias Darin As I mentioned before, I have a list of related articles at the end of each post. Getting the algorithm right was a pain in the butt. However, it was well worth it. Since I wrote the software I use to generate this blog from scratch, it gave me an unprecedented opportunity to do things differently. For example, my blog is not database driven, but rather, it uses flat storage. Another such area was the way article relationships were calculated. All of the software I evaluated used the same basic approach for related articles: They take the current article and compare previous articles to see if a relationship exists and previous articles are not re-evaluated for future relationship. I call this approach backwards relations as it only scans the past articles. The approach I wanted was to have an article I wrote a year ago be evaluated to today's article or even an article I might write in the future. I call this approach future relations. It may sound easy and, in fact, the algorithms between backward and future relationships are almost identical; however; the actual metrics are quite arduous. Both approaches have good and bad to them. Backwards relationships are quick to calculate and once calculated, they never change. That has a major advantage in the way of speed and memory. However, there is a downside. The downside is that any new or future articles will not gain from any related links of past articles. So from the standpoint of a search engine, new articles have less links and are subsequently ranked lower then previous articles. In my opinion, this is a very undesirable result to writing new articles as I want them ranked higher or equal to past articles. Future relationships, on the other hand, do not have this problem. In fact, this method causes new articles to be ranked by search engines are equal or higher to past articles, depending of the number of relationships calculated. For search engine optimization, this is very crucial as you want your new articles found before your older ones. Future relationships sounds like the "holy grail" of relationship management but, as I said above, it too has its bad. The bad part is that every article has to be re-evaluated to any articles in its future. The price for this is time. On my prayer ministry blog, re-evaluating all twelve to fifteen thousand prayers can take forty minutes or more. Ouch! Unfortunately, the time and space needed for future relationships is often the biggest hurdle to overcome. For database storage blogs, a backwards relationship, is often the best as no blog owner, my self included, wants to wait forty minutes online to add a new article. This is where a flat storage blog has a dramatic advantage since it does all the grunt work offline. I type in my article, hit the post button and forget it. My software detects the new article has handles the rest. For this blog, it only takes about 30 seconds, but as it grows in the number of articles, so will the time to re-evaluate all the article relationships. A second reason, and just important as the first, is for your readers. Related articles give your readers quick links that relate to what they are reading. Most visitors are not going to comb through a blog's archives or use a search feature as it is simply to cumbersome. Categories and tags offer a better approach then a search. From the reader's standpoint, its easier and faster for them to have a pre-determined list to scan. Having a related articles section increases the likelihood the visitor will stay longer rather then returning to the search engine. Which every approach you use, future or backwards relationships, really doesn't matter as long as your content can be quickly found. Having a related articles section though is paramount to being found as it helps search engines and your visitors get to the content you offer. 
Top tags: articles, article, future, relationships, new, related, search, approach, blog, backwards Comments from foodntravella 60.53.165.167 I truly agree especially on the last paragraph! A good article to share with others. Comments from Mar Matthias Darin Thank you.
PermaLink Home
Please share your thoughts on this article. |
|
![[Valid RSS]](http://matthiaschronicles.tanaya.net/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
