Related posts (or similar) benefit for SEO

Marketing
1

Often on web pages below the main content you’ll see a section with ‘related posts’ or ‘If you liked this, you might like’, then a list of 4-5 links to similar pages on the same site.

My question is, does this help with the SEO for those linked pages much?

If the ‘related posts’ was structured like text, e.g. instead of

<div>Related posts:
	<ul>
		<li>Link 1</li>
		<li>Link 2</li>
		<li>Link 3</li>
		<li>Link 4</li>
	</ul>
</div>

you could have

<p>Some posts with a similar subject to this one are Link1, Link2, Link3, and also Link4</p>

Would this be much better SEO wise? Or would Google see that the same structure is appearing on many of your pages and so discount it?

I’m not using Wordpress, so implementing related posts/pages would take some work on my part, and with the way my site is structured it wouldn’t provide much benefit to the user. So I’d like to check writing the code to generate this would have a reasonable benefit before I do it.

Thanks

Dave

2

only if those pages are not linked to from anywhere else

if you have a sitemap, then the answer is no, it doesn’t

so don’t do it

:slight_smile:

3

Doesn’t matter how you will format your HTML structure for that purpose. The benefit of linking to “relevant pages” of your own site is to improve the internal linking structure, so use any structure you like, it won’t really matter for SEO.

4

Thanks for the advice, I won’t waste my time with it then.

Dave