Contextly recently introduced powerful tools to let sites make related post and popular recommendations on their sites more customizable to their needs.
There’s now 3 main ways to filter recommendations:
- By Post Date
- By Categories or Tags
- Blacklisting single urls or word/phrase
By Post Date: Contextly now lets you limit how far back our recommendations go. So for instance, if you have 10 years worth of posts, you might want to only show readers recommendations from the last three years.
You can now set a Global Default that limits this.
Older posts will still show recommendations, but the older posts don’t show up in recommendations.
But we also realized two things:
A) You should be able to override the Global Default for certain content so that older posts like How-Tos still show up.
So we made it possible for you to do that.
And B) that some content is better with a very short-time limit. So we made it possible for you to limit those even more than the Global Default. For instance, you might have a category called Deal of the Week and links to older deals aren’t great because they’ve expired.
So in that case, you can set that category to 7 days, while the Global Default is 3 years.
See below how the Global Default is 2 years, while posts tagged Fashion got set to 6 months and posts in the Cars category are set to 1 year.
By Tags and Categories:
If there are particular tags or categories you simply don’t want included in related post recommendations or even in your popular posts or evergreen post recommendations, you can exclude these posts from the recommendations.
For example, you might have a tag for corrections or for internal announcements.
Simply choose which ones you would like to exclude under the Content Settings tab and the option “Filter by Tag/Category”.
Here posts tagged Advertisement are excluded as are posts in the Categories “Expired” and “Uncategorized.”
By Url or Keyword:
You may have very particular content that you don’t want surfacing in recommendations. If you want to exclude a post from recommendations, simply copy and paste the url into the exclusion box.
For instance, you might have an older post that’s clickbaity or just not your best work. This lets you keep it out of the related posts and out of the popular and evergreen recommendations. However, posts that are excluded from the recommendations will still have recommendations on them (this is a feature, not a bug).
You can also filter related posts based on keywords. So, for instance, if you wanted to filter out posts with the words “car accident” or “NSFW”, you can do that as well.
You can find both of these filter tools under Content Settings -> “Filter by URL/word”.
As always, if you have feedback or other needs, just drop us a note at info@contextly.com