On my “Matt Cutts” twitter account a few days ago I asked other folks which WordPress “Related Posts” plug-in they would recommend. It seems like “Related Posts” extensions go in and out of vogue every few years, so I wanted to hear what smart folks were using lately. The plugins that got recommended the most to me were:
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), by mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine).
- Similar Posts, by Rob Marsh.
- Aizattos Related Posts, by, um, Aizatto, I guess. This plugin no longer seems to be maintained officially, so that link is to an unofficial mirror.
- WordPress Related Posts, by Denis (Hua?).
- Wasabi Related entries plug-in.
I did a little digging on each of these. My criteria (in order) was: the easiest plugin to install, that appeared to be actively maintained, and ideally would give me lots of options. The first one I ended up trying was Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), and mitcho has really done a fantastic job on it:
- It’s trivial to install.
- You don’t have to edit your WordPress template.
- The relevance is good: the suggested posts are related, and you can tweak thresholds and how things are computed if you want.
So I think I’m happy. Even the things that I might want down the road (show the date of posts, RSS feed support, and sentence-aware excerpts) are on the to-do list. But the plug-in is very usable even without any tweaking. I’ll include a screenshot of the options page in case you want to see what sort of flexibility you have:
Well done, mitcho! If you feel strongly that another Related Posts plugin is better, feel free to say so in the comments.
{ 90 comments… read them below or add one }
This may be a little off topic, but I really enjoy Moveable Type Plug Ins and Moveable Type. But you have to be a rocket scientist to use it. It seems like Google likes it better as well.
I think “Similar Post” is the best related post plugin, no doubt. It has more options and is incredibly accurate.
It can exclude common words like “the” “for” etc, of the matches even in other languages.
A big plus is that his autor Rob Marsh, answer almost in no time any question or suggestion you post in his blog.
Matt,
I see the followings ONLY when I click on comments:
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I like simple things, that why I use “Simple Tags” plugin that is great for tags and also haves a “related post” function that works great… doesnt have LOTS of options but it does a great job.
FYI: I believe Sphere’s Related Content Widget achieves this as well (via a link at the bottom of posts):
http://www.sphere.com/#wpwidget
However, it shows content from other blogs as well and I doubt it offers any flexibility.
Another vote for Simple Tags. Does the job just fine (based on tags) — and makes it easy to add Related Posts to feed as well.
On a related note it would also be nice if Google Blog Search’s link operator RSS feed would work steadily, as it theoretically makes for a nice related posts/ sort of trackback feature. But last time I tried it, it found way too little backlinks for permalinks, even from popular backlinking blogs…
Harith, yup, that’s the “RSS feed” option that I referred to at the end of my post. YARPP doesn’t support RSS feeds in the current version, but I’m not that worried about that, personally. Related posts are more handy for someone who is browsing, I think.
Yeah, you’re right Matt. Micho’s YARPP is the best so plugin for related posts. I tried almost all the plugins and finally ended with this one. Very easy to install, the Match Threshold option is very good for new web sities, where there are few posts.
You had no bigger image to post right?
Matt, vBullentin have a very similar feature, called “Similar Threads”. I have tweaked mine extensively and I feel sure that it reduces the same old questions being asked that most forums suffer from.
Good job by mitcho and he has made a extremely friendly GUI for settings.
hmm doesn’t seem to have the ability to put related posts in the RSS feed like Aizattos does.
Also this renders weird in FF3
Michael 芳貴 Erlewine
I’d love to try this plugin as from the screenshot it looks like its what i’ve been looking for but the site appears to be down. Anyone have an alternative download link?
Thanks
We’re also looking for a related post plug-in Matt.
In your travels did you find any that allow you to select the actual posts you want to be displayed as “related” (as opposed to relying on a “relativity” calculation) ..?
Being able to simply select other posts in a check-box type manner would make related post life easier. It would eliminate any errors caused by calculations, and offer absolute control.
I hope a WordPress PlugIn Wizard reads this and makes one, quickly.
graywolf, thanks for mentioning the RSS related posts function – I would consider that one of my ‘requirements’ when considering a ‘related posts’ plugin. I’m still going to check out YARPP and WASABI…just to see what will work best for my blog and our company. Timely post Matt, this has been on my ‘to do’ list for a looong time!
graywolf, I saw that you run Aizattos, but I don’t like that the plugin isn’t maintained anymore. If someone found a security hole in the plugin, that would be bad news.
Yes – on FF3 your post look very bad.
I’ve only tried Similar Posts, but I’ve had no reason to try other plugins. Similar Posts was a major improvement over the purely tag-based similar posts plugin I was using in Movable Type before I migrated my blog to Wordpress.
Similar Posts has lots of options you can adjust and like Tanguillo said above, Rob Marsh’s support for his plugins is nothing short of excellent. There was a small problem with the plugin, I asked about it, Rob told me how to fix it myself for the time being and then included the fix in the next version.
It’s the size of the screen cap that’s throwing off the image. It’s spilling over into the right-side menu, and for some reason the right-side menu is dominant.
Maybe a thumbnail’s in order?
Sorry…that should read “throwing off the post”. Also, the Chinese rendering is part of the screen cap…I’m not sure if that’s what the rendering issue is or not, though.
I use a modification of wasabi’s related posts plugin which shows related posts only within the chosen categories of the post. That gives better relevance. I would be happy to make it public if there is an interest.
Hi Matt.
I also use the ‘Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)’ and I am fully satisfied with it. As you also said, mitcho has done a fantastic job. Thumbs up for that plugin and best regards from Denmark…
Thank you! I wanted to ask on my blog, but I don’t have enough readers to get a great response.
Hi Matt,
Just read your post and felt relax because I was looking for a plugin like this for a long time without much success.
Installed “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” on several blogs but then when view in browser it gave very strange MySQL error. What it displays is actually a quite big SQL statement?
Which wordpress version is your blog? I am installing it on 2.2.2 maybe its the version which causes this?
Regards
ajaxus, I’m running a much more recent version of WordPress. You should probably upgrade your WP to the latest version or else hackers might take it over.
It is a pitty that there is not option with your recommendet similar post plugin to search for specific languages.
A friend of mine (Cesar Rodas) wrote a propose for the Google Sumer of Code about this using n-grams.
Ended up writing WP-Storage and won the price… but still, i like his idea
http://www.thyphp.com/gsoc-wp-category-suggester-proposal.html
Matt, I think it’s about time you comment about the whole Knol situation – knol articles out ranking sites that have had content for months or years. Aaron Wall and Search Engine Land have made posts which I’m sure you’ve seen…..please comment about this.
Angsuman Chakraborty.
There’s definitely interest. do tell.
Similar Posts is best option. Why?
Because it doesnt hurt my MySQL database.
My host is Media Temple and they provide me a GPU tool where I can analyze the CPU performance. By far Similar Posts is the winner. It creates an index so it doenst has to full scan my posts to get similars every visit.
I was using Aizatto’s related posts until now. Since support has been withdrawn and security issue may prop up at any point in time with Aizatto’s posts, I’m switching to YARPP dismissing the disadvantage of related posts not showing up in RSS with YARPP.
This is an amazing plugin, I will translate it to spanish.
Regards
Hi all–this is mitcho, the author of YARPP.
I noticed a number of hits coming from this blog, so I thought I’d drop in and see what all the fuss is about. Matt, thank you for your kind words! I’m glad you have had a good experience with the plugin.
For those of you with various enhancement requests (RSS support, support for other language stopwords) or bugs (SQL requests being printed? Please give me details!): I encourage you to see if your request or bug has already been brought up on the wordpress forums and, if not, add a new topic. I check threads on the plugin daily and try to respond quickly to inquiries. I hope to continue to improve the plugin based on feedback such as what has been voiced here!
Thanks again,
mitcho
I’m also a bit concerned about how these plugins will affect database performance. I’ve seen the vBulletin “Similar Threads” feature totally destroy MySQL, so there are certainly technical considerations here. If YARPP is doing full table scans on every pageload, blogs with any amount of history and/or readership are going to run into some problems.
HI Matt I also am looking for a good related post plug in.
thanks for the post,im going to install this when i get home from work
Matt What other good tools do you have besides this? I’m gonna render my lifestyle towards the way you run yours. You seem to have all the cool stuff!
lt
http://www.skool.com
mitcho, cool! Thanks for stopping by.
Hi mitcho
Do you any plug-ins for vBullentin?
Great rundown, I just want to add another vote for including related posts in the RSS feed. If a user happens to subscribe near the end of a series of related posts they’ll see immediately that there’s more reading available.
Hi original Dave— No, I haven’t worked with vB before… my tools of choice are normally bbPress for bulletin boards, zenphoto for galleries, and wp for blogs… I have built a number of plugins for each of these.
mitcho
Thanks mitcho, thought I’d ask anyway. Keep up the great work.
Hi again, I played with it and yes it was the Wordpress version which was causing these.
I successfully installed the plugin on Wordpress 2.5
Probably mitcho should put some minimum requirements
Still, thanks for the work!
Google was screwing up and ranking “related posts” excerpts and not the actual page in search so I had to remove it from my blogs.
If Matt is using a plugin maybe it is safe again or maybe you just need massive Matt like pagerank for the deeper/crawl index. Could I just be imagining this bug? Google still has problems with blogs.
Hi Matt,
I hope you read this, cos I am a bit late. You will be the best person to answer this as you are in the Google WebSpam team. I added this plugin in my blog and the related posts that are being displayed are fine and accurate. Will search engines consider the blogs to be filled with spam as the excerpts are not full?
Thanks.
@godofthunder1982
Its running well on my blogs (YARPP) and the speed of loading is approx. same.
I don’t think it does a full table scan on every page load, but that is my idea. Donno how the plugin works.
@ajaxus… Ahah, yes, I apologize, 2.0’s tag and category features make it require WP 2.5. I’ll make that clearer in the next point release.
@godofthunder1982 + @emposts, the answer: yes and no. I personally believe YARPP does a great job performance wise and, as it caches nicely, should be no problem in a high-volume production environment with WP-Cache or a derivative.
In terms of the actual queries, YARPP uses both fulltext searches for post content and tables (very very fast and uses very little memory) and multi-table comparison for tags and categories (more memory-intensive). As any plugin that gives you related posts by similar tags or categories does essentially the same thing for the more memory-intensive portion, I believe the overhead of adding the fulltext searches (very small in mysql) has a huge ROI. I am a firm believer that actually considering the content in this manner, not just tags or categories, gives you more accurate relations.
The current main query in 2.0 uses a number of subselects, and I do plan on experimenting with the query in the near future to better optimize it. I hope that answers your questions. Keep them coming! ^^
mitcho
Great discussions.
I was leaning toward Similar Posts, because of dbase concerns, but mitcho’s discussion gives me confidence that he will stay on top of dbase issues.
Thanks for experimenting and giving your views on the pick of the lot, Matt.
Yes.. YARPP is a great plugin.. I’ve installed it after read this post. and that is just what I’m looking for..Matt, Thanks for sharing..
Thanks for this round-up. Installed YARPP based on your recommendation and it is indeed easy to use and works really well.
From version 2.1, YARPP has the option of showing up in feeds too, check it out.
Thanks for sharing this Matt! I was looking for the exact same thing, but unfortunately it was quite difficult to base my decision on the information in the WordPress plugin directory.
Oh, and I can confirm that it works with WordPress 2.7 Beta2, because that is the version I am using on my blog
Can someone give me a detailed breakdown of why Mitcho’s plugin is better than Similar Posts. Pretty please with whip cream on top. I would like to add a plugin that gives this functionality to my blog and do not mind if it is more difficult to add. I really want whatever will give the end user the best experience. Even if it frustrates me!
Thanks for this post. I’ve been looking for a good related posts plugin that didn’t require me to mess with my php files manually.
Having tried both Similar Posts and YARPP, I like YARPP best. It has more output and tweaking options than Similar Posts, easier to use and configure.
In my opinion “Similar Post” is definitely the best post plugin. It is the plugin with the most options. The other plugins are also good – maybe they will be able to cope one day.
I definately intend on using it for my Safari blog. I think it looks great thanks for the review.
I’m using YARPP as well but having some problem with my host.
My account get suspended a few times for overloading the server.
After I gone through the log and I found that these are the longest query_time. (I suppose this is the rootcause)
# Query_time: 139 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 3 Rows_examined: 2166687
use getptcom_wrdp10;
SELECT ID, post_title, post_date, post_content, post_excerpt, COUNT( DISTINCT tagtax.term_taxonomy_id ) as tagscore, COUNT( DISTINCT cattax.term_taxonomy_id ) as catscore, (0+ COUNT( DISTINCT tagtax.term_taxonomy_id ) * 1+ COUNT( DISTINCT cattax.term_taxonomy_id ) * 1) as score
I’m not confirm this is from YARPP but as my understanding only 1 of my plugin use the “score”.
I’ve tried to disable related option limited to Tag and Category ONLY yet the same problem exist.
Any suggestion?
Okay, found the answer myself through mitcho blog
Thanks again mitcho for this great plugin and looking forward your update.
“Does YARPP slow down my blog/server?
A little bit, yes. Every time you display a post with automatic display of related posts (or one of the related_*() functions) it will calculate the related posts, which can be a database-intensive operation. I highly recommend all YARPP users use a page-caching plugin, such as WP-SuperCache. For the majority of users, this type of caching will be enough to stem the performance issues.
If you have a large blog with many (>1000) posts or have many tags or categories, YARPP may noticibly affect your blog’s performance, even with a caching plugin. For these large blogs, for the time being I recommend you disable the “consider tags” and “consider categories” options. Turning off any “disallow” tags or categories will also speed things up.
In the future I will be building a YARPP-internal cache system so that YARPP can calculate all the post-relations at one time and then re-use those results every time, rather than calculating them on the fly.”
I was running YARPP for a few days and it was great. But I had to remove it last night because it was dragging my site down. Everything was loading so slow. I removed plugin by plugin to see if that was the problem. And it was slow until I removed YARPP.
I’m very disappointed because YARPP is a great plugin.
Tony K – sorry to hear that–please take a look at my FAQ answer on performance issues, which KC was kind enough to copy/paste above.
I’ll be releasing a beta of the next revision with the caching system soon.
I had YARPP on my newscenter. It’s the best plugin for related posts I think. But it slow down my server with to many sql-querries at every reading. So I have to remove it and choose another plugin. After a update with more performance issues I’ll test it again.
Hi Tim et al,
I just released a beta of the next revision (3.0 beta 1) which has that new caching feature which should substantially improve feed performance. There’s also a neat new templating feature for which I’ve written a tutorial here. I hope you enjoy it!
The recommended plugin YARP causes a loop conflict when using the Yet Another Photo Blog plugin, causing the main image to repeatedly appear… Just a heads up!
@Rod – I actually am currently building better support for Yet Another Photo Blog through templates–a feature which will be introduced in YARPP 3. I have an explanation of templates (including a bit on the YAPB interaction) here:
http://mitcho.com/blog/projects/yarpp-3-templates/
If you feel like it, I’d love to know if you’re seeing this error with YARPP 3 as well… you can download YARPP 3 beta 2 here:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/yet-another-related-posts-plugin.3.0b2.zip
Thanks!
Well, thanks for the feedback on YARPP. Earlier, I deactivated it from my wordpress but lowering matching settings from 7 to 2 have made it work. So, I am happy now
Take care and keep up the good work.
Many thanks for the recommendations!
I found that YARPP slows down my page loads incredibly, though. “Similar Posts” from Rob Marsh has no such problems with my blog’s configuration, while still being very customizable – sticking with it!
Otilia—thanks for trying out YARPP. The fact that the algorithm is more complex does make it slower, which is a known issue of YARPP 2.x. I’m currently working on version 3.0 which incorporates a cache to directly tackle this problem. You can download the latest beta here: http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/. Thanks!
Finally I found this plugin. Before this, I use Similar Post. Then I saw some blog have excerpt on the Related Post. So I hunt for it and find it here.
Thanks for making this cool plugin
Could you tell me can I add related posts in featured content?
Do you think that we can do it like featured post in msn.com?
Did you take a look at other plugins you meant in the post? I used YARP plugin, but it queries a lot. So I want an alternative.
Thanks for looking into these, as it saved me (and I’m sure others) some work. I just installed YARPP and it seems pretty easy to use.
I was so frustrated with all the related post plugins and widgets, I just created my own and named it Best related post with thumbnails plugin. I think it might be relevent to your readers. give it a try http://www.sutlej.net/downloads/best-related-posts/
it is not as complex as the plugin you have reviewed above but it works fine for blogs with images in posts
I made a great plugin with the RSS related posts function. Acctualy that is the first and the only one plugin who can put out a list of other articles from other blogs as related posts.
Check it!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-related-posts/
Thanks Matt! I’m using “similar posts”, Is much simpler and it fits our needs, but I’ll keep YARPP in mind for future developments:)
I made a nice plugin that display related posts from another blogs usig google index bot!
I use rss.php from wordpress, and some simple functions. It is verry simple to use and the links that will be displayed use pingback and trackback …
take a look at this rss related posts
Nice discussion is going on for “Related Post”. When I was searching for this one, I could not find any one easily. May be my search term was very bad. Then I have ended up with “search engine related posts” plugin By Volcano, which is not that good when I compare facilities mentioned here.
Can someone else comment on R. Mak’s best related posts with thumbnail plugin? http://www.sutlej.net/downloads/best-related-posts/ One problem I am having is it does not use tags to determine the related posts and a lot of posts are completely unrelated. I am unsure how it affects the database and speed of site (my site is not live yet). Has anyone looked into this yet? Thanks for any insight.
Thanks for this post. I’m about to install a plugin and I think I’ll use your suggestion and go with this one first
I have implemented a little script, which simply reads out related posts by comparing the tags. I have implemented it directly into the single.php. The script can be found here:
http://www.3mind.at/2009/05/06/code-highlighting/
It is fast, easy to implement and doesn’t cloak up my plugin list
Maybe it helps somebody.
this is really nice m also gonna try YARP ,currently using wpthumbie(not so good,but does task done).
In my opinion we should not use yet another related post as it consumes lot of memory and also not compatible with latest version of wordpress and this plugin made my site out of order for almost 6 hours.
Its better to use similar post plugin.
My site started crashing when I was updating wordpress. I called Go Daddy for tech support and they said “yet another wordpress plugin” caused load issues. I uninstalled the plugin and the issue went away. So … I don’t recommend it.
I’m looking for a related post plugin. so come here to see the suggestions. The publish time of this post is so early. Maybe I’m behind the times.
Very good discussion here folks.
I’m also looking for a new similar post plugin – and whilst YARPP does seem good on paper, the fact that there are soo many performance related problems makes it unusable on most popular blogs.
That said the support for YARPP is second to known and as soon as the performance related issues are fixed and any issues with the latest versions of wordpress then it will become the related post plugin of choice for many.
For now though IMO its best to stick with ’similar posts’
I believe this YARPP is the best plugin we may find for related post plugin. So much features and easy navigation for novice user like me. Anyhow, it would be very useful and more friendly if the plugin may provide certain appearance for the plugin such as related post with a thumb image on each line and somewhat like option to show how many comments for each related post. Many beginners dont really know how to customize the php template at backend. Great idea isnt it? Hahaha. Anyway, thanks for the post!
i was using yarpp at one blog and wprp (wordpress related posts) at another and both r hosted at different shared hosts. the one with wprp has more traffic more page views etc but it never went down where as the blog with yarpp has been suspended twice cause of more resource usage. i have uninstalled yarpp and thinking to go with wprp.
YARPP has a major flaw, which effects any larger blog (mine has 10K hits a day and 200 posts). It does its ‘related by tag’ query on each page load, which is a huge CPU hit. It pushed me over my host’s CPU limits.
You can disable using tags for relatedness, which is even what the author suggests in his home page, but that reduces the relevance of its recommendations.
I was just looking for a way to show related posts on my website. Even so, I didnt knew so many exist. I will follow your guidance and choose the first one too. (laziness
)
Installed this plugin for my new blog, but decided against it after it asked me to alter something in my directory. Didn’t want to mess anything up, might go and give it a go later in the week.
ooh, matt – this post has made your blog page look all weird! the information crosses over into your sidebar. i’m looking at it on a mac and using the latest version of firefox
: )
In my opinion the simply tags plugin is the best way to go. Easy to install, easy to use, and the related posts feature gets the job done nicely for me.