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Full Posts or Excerpts On Blog’s Homepage?
Around the globe there are many people blogging. Some as a hobby, some as a part time job and some as professional full-time bloggers. Generally, there are two ways all those different kind of bloggers display their articles on the blog’s homepage.
Some of those bloggers use Full articles, some use Excerpts. There isn’t a guideline that tells you what is best for your blog and all different kind of examples show it doesn’t make your blog less successful if you either use full posts, or excerpts.
Photo by -Bast-
Arguments
Some say excerpts are lots better.
They talk about duplicated content problems when they use full posts. Your article will be visible in full for search engines twice, which means SE’s can punish you for ‘cheating the search engine’.
Some say it takes too much space on the homepage. They say it’s better to have more different titles and text on the homepage, because visitors have more chance to see something interesting.
On the other side
On the other side there are people that think different:
They say it’s better for their readers because they don’t have to click another link to read the whole entry. When you click that ‘read more’ button it takes a couple seconds to load the single page. With full posts on the homepage, you don’t have that problem.
Some say full posts look loads better on a specific layout, which is from my side of view very logic!
Anyway
In the new WordPress theme for DivitoDesign I will use excerpts. I want the theme to have a magazine style look, which means it has to display many different articles/news/etc. With the current theme though, I worked with full posts because that looked better to me.
I am not sure what to think on this case. I think sometimes full articles are in the favor of usage, while in other blogs, excerpts do the job.
What do you think? Do you think the reasons why to show excerpts are more accurate? Or do you use Full posts on your blog? Why?
Give me some discussion and your reasons by leaving a comment! It’s always interesting to know what you think!
I vote for Excerpts! I work in the field of SEO and it’s a good idea to use Excerpts to avoid duplicate content issues.
Thanks. Example: If you publish 5 posts on the homepage and you post a article each day (one article will be in full on the homepage for 5 days), do you think that causes duplicated content issues? Interesting to know.
I using Magazine theme. I like it because my blog look clear and clean. I vote for Excerpts
Yes, with a magazine style theme you should always use excerpts! Thanks for your comment.
Depending on the length of your posts and the layout of the theme it could do either way. In my opinion excerpts are the way to go because they take up less space on the page leaving room for more important information or other content..
Great article and very useful for those magazine “themeing” bloggers out there.