Thread: Blogging: "Read More" - Bad for SEO?

Hello everyone.

I am trying to use those nifty "read more" links on my blog. My goal is to leave just a small amount of content to catch the reader's attention and interest them enough to click "read more" - I also think this method will increase the amount of posts I can fit on the first page. However, isn't reducing the amount of content on the first page a bad thing?

When I say reducing the amount of content, I mean making less content visible because of the use of the "read more" links. So for SEO, is it a better option to not use "read more" or does it not really have any affect?

Advice is appreciated. Thanks!

It depends on the template and the niche. I think that with a general interest 'blog read more' wouldn't work as well as with a technical blog.

I planning on using a read more format for a site. I below that it will work better for seo in that the content is not duplicated on the post and homepage.

In terms of SEO, your titles should have keywords in them and you can use custom post excerpts to get keywords on the main page. "Read More" is really more about usability, and allowing readers to see more content that is available. It also reduces duplicate content and makes the page smaller. Most people don't like scrolling down on a new website.

I say use the excerpts. They've definitely upped my own statistics.

Thanks for the advice, everyone.

I have edited the theme to include excerpts and set them up for all of my posts. The homepage is looking good now and has totally unique content. As for the idea about keywords - I set these up, as well as descriptions. I'll be working on the titles and whatnot soon as well. Thanks for this suggestion.

If you dont have read more, then your content is duplicated between frontpage and single post. So I am thinking that is much worse then text with the read more.

Also probably search engines are now smart enough to know what is last post what is read more and why they exists...

I was once obsessed with that. I used to think that many things are bad for SEO, but they aren't, actually. When you look at them from a theoretical viewpoint, they are bad for SEO, but when you test it, you come to a conclusion that search engine spiders are very smart and they can tell the difference.

So, I wouldn't worry about that.

Originally Posted by dmi

I was once obsessed with that. I used to think that many things are bad for SEO, but they aren't, actually. When you look at them from a theoretical viewpoint, they are bad for SEO, but when you test it, you come to a conclusion that search engine spiders are very smart and they can tell the difference.

So, I wouldn't worry about that.

I often wondered this too. I would imagine a spider would be smart enough to recognize a blog and actually understand in a way how a blog works. I'm not sure if that's how it is, but that's how it should be.

Eh, I don't think it matters. I prefer blogs with "read more" links AND just ones with the whole text up front. Though, I DO click the read more links a lot more often than I would if I could just read from the front page.

Originally Posted by Hellas

If you dont have read more, then your content is duplicated between frontpage and single post. So I am thinking that is much worse then text with the read more.

Also probably search engines are now smart enough to know what is last post what is read more and why they exists...

Usually a sitemap will take care of the problem.

I use custom excerpts so that the text on my home page and category page are different from that of the post itself. The excerpt can be worded a little more exciting to entice the reader to click through to the full post.

At the end of excerpt I include a "read more" link WITHOUT "read more" as the link text. Instead I will have something like "Read the full article on <a href="MyPostURL">Google Page Rank</a>" This gives me two links to the post (the title and the read more link at the end of the excerpt) and allows me to have two slight variations of link text as well.