Hello,
I have a site set up with Vantage theme and I’m wondering how the system selects which posts to display in the Related posts section at the bottom of the page.
To start with I thought it was because I didn’t have enough posts on the site so it was doing the best it could, but now I should have enough posts that it selects based on tag or category and shows truly related posts. But it’s still selecting stuff that doesn’t have common tags or categories.
Is there way to control the selection criteria, or if I knew how it selects, I could manipulate posts to get better resutls?
Hi Paul
Thanks for posting your question. The related posts section in Vantage works as follows:
Jetpack Plugin: If the Jetpack plugin is installed and activated, it uses the [jetpack-related-posts] shortcode to display related posts. Jetpack automatically finds and displays related posts based on various factors.
Categories: If Jetpack is not available, the function will look at the categories of the current post.
It takes the first category of the post.
It then searches for other posts in the same category.
It excludes the current post from the results.
It limits the results to 3 posts.
It ignores sticky posts (posts that are pinned to the top of the blog).
You could perhaps give YARPP a try for control over post selection: https://wordpress.org/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/. You can disable the Vantage related posts from AppearanceCustomizeTheme SettingsBlog.