We have been using Related Entries plugin from the day we started blogging. And we had observed that many people use to click on the related entries articles more, as they were interested in reading more of the stuffs that they were previously interested in(obviously, right?).
We had seen many bloggers using and recommending this plugin(If you are not using any Related Entries plugin, then we highly recommend it). But to our disappointment some irrelevant articles from our blog started to appear on the Related article section. And when we use to see the preview of our article in wordpress, we could see no related articles.
But from the day we had 85+ articles on our blog, this plugin started working like a charm. Now the related articles are matching more accurately and related articles are shown even when we see the preview of our article.
Related Entries(or any such plugins) plugin should get more articles to match, so that it can match more accurate articles and present it. We know that, this is a common sense, but still we see many people talking about the efficiency of such(related entry) plugin’s without having atleast 20 articles on their blog. So we just thought that, this article would be a good thing to flush the commonsense and to re-direct the beginner bloggers to concentrate more on the content development.
There are someplugins which are more advanced and has more things(related to article match) under our control. But these plugin’s are little bit difficult to configure. For people who want simple and yet powerful plugin, use Related Entries plugin.
I think that the Related Article plugin is quite useful, as you have mentioned, when the number of articles is above a certain amount, such as 50 or 85. It is quite useful for viewers, since there is no better article to follow one with than another from the same site on a similar topic.
Thank you for sharing. I also think that related posts feature might help to keep visitors longer at the blog. However I prefer other related posts plugin called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Although it is true that to make the most out of this plugin you have to spend some time to set it correctly, I think it is worthy. But of course you need to have at least 80-100 articles published.
Regards,
Peter