Learn about Reader recommendations

The WordPress.com Reader recommends posts and websites based on editorial curation and algorithmic selection. In this guide, you’ll learn about where we recommend content and how your posts can be featured in these recommendations.

WordPress.com recommends content in the Discover page (including Freshly Pressed) and throughout the Reader based on your activity and popular posts:

Discover highlights content across WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites. When you visit the Discover menu in the Reader, you’ll find the following tabs:

• Freshly Pressed: A curated selection of our team’s favorite content. Learn how we select content for Freshly Pressed.
• Recommended: Popular posts based on the tags you follow. If you don’t follow any tags, this defaults to the dailyprompt and WordPress tags.
• First posts: First-time posts from new bloggers.
• Tags: Posts that use popular tags.
• Latest: The latest posts related to tags you follow.

Recommended content also appears throughout the Reader:

• Reader Search: Displays the most popular content that matches your search criteria.
• Reader Post Recommendations: A feed of recommendations based on what you’ve recently liked or commented on, displayed in the Reader search page.
• Reader “More on WordPress.com” Related Posts: The most popular content on WordPress.com that’s similar to the current post, shown at the bottom of all posts in the Reader.

You can also display related posts on your own site. Related posts show only posts from within the same site and are selected based on the title, content, and engagement.

WordPress.com curates recommended content through algorithmic recommendations based on user activity. In this section, you’ll learn how to increase your chances of appearing in algorithm-driven recommended feeds.

Reader recommendations use algorithms to automatically curate content based on user activity and post characteristics. The algorithms consider many factors when selecting recommendations:

• The title, content, tags, and categories of posts.
• Site information such as usernames, site names, and host names.
• Total number of likes and comments.
• Who has liked and commented on a post.
• Total number of subscribers.
• Who has subscribed to a site.
• How recently a post was published.
• How regularly or recently a site has posted.
• The content of what you’ve liked and commented on.
• Whether posts include links, images, or videos.
• How often a site has been rejected from Reader recommendations.

Your post likes and comments on other WordPress blogs influence recommendations. Take a look at your recent like activity to understand what similar content you might see. To prevent your comments from being included in recommendations, log out before commenting.

We also hand-select posts to appear in Freshly Pressed.

The recommendation algorithms filter out the following types of content:

• Sites identified as spam.
• Sites with mature content.
• Sites with objectionable content.
• Content not in your language.