For sites with hundreds of posts, there’s a rich underlying content that isn’t out of date and still gives value to readers. These older stories are what we call Evergreens, since they keep giving value to readers long after they have been published.

Contextly automatically identifies evergreen stories on our publishers’ sites and uses them as one of the recommendation strategies in the Explore section (we pair evergreens with personalization and popular). We’ve found that evergreens perform as well as or better than the popular sections.

Here’s one of my favorites from Make:, a post about how to cut wine bottles into drinking glasses with easy clean cuts. It’s from 2010 and readers still love it in 2015.

After it showed up in the Evergreen section of the Contextly reports continuously, Make: then added a new story updating the post with a way to make cutting bottles cleanly even easier.

The other great thing about evergreen stories is that they do change. We see stories, especially seasonal ones, bubble up and become relevant again.

Getting those in front of readers doesn’t just help readers; it helps publishers get the most from the work they do.

[For the month of November 2015, in honor of National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month #NaBloPoMo, I’ll be writing a post a day about a favorite Contextly feature. It’s a bit of a love letter and a bit of a how-to.]

If you want to try Contextly on your own WordPress site, you can download it from the WordPress plugin gallery or you want to learn about our custom CMS integration, drop us a line.