: "Read more" link bad or good for SEO? I have seen that most bloggers are using "read more" as link text to posts on their home page that link to the full article or blog post. I understand

@Gloria169

As a dev implementing various news/posting sites, I have always been told by our SEO teams that "Read more" or "Continue" links are considered harmful:


You will end up with a lot of occurrences of that text appearing on the listing page.
Your internal links should have unique text - incoming link text has weight for the article, ideally you should use the title of the article as the link text.


From a usability point of view this works best if you use a short (2-3 lines) summary or "stand-first" rather than just taking the first paragraph. You can then just use the title as the link to the full article.

If you do just re-use the opening paragraph, then you should use some other indication that the article continues (i.e. ellipsis"…").

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@YK1175434

In general, from a SEO point of view, read more links are implemented on blogs for the following reasons:


to avoid duplicate content between homepage and articles (the main reason)
for visitors to see more article titles on the home page (to act as a sort of table of contents)
to pass more PageRank to an article if the read more links point to an anchor in the article
thus to try to optimize SEO and make happy visitors by improving navigation on the homepage


However, Google and other blogs doesn't use it because:


search engines like Google don't consider displaying full articles on the homepage duplicate content anymore
webmasters want to display the maximum amount of content on the home page to give it more SEO value.


However, it's not good or bad for SEO. The best thing to do is to use the option you prefer for your visitors. Personally, I like read more links to improve visibility of more article titles on the homepage of my blogs.

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@Si4351233

It's bad SEO methods. There is no value for that websites to improve rankings on search engines. It will be help to visitors to read your content.

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@Steve110

You should use it or not based on what is comfortable to site visitors.

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@Sherry384

The text read more does not add value. From an SEO perspective, it is a bad thing.

I should briefly explain why.

I do not follow blog software. I am not a blogger. But here is some of what I know.

Your blog home page lists snippets of several articles with a linked title, perhaps a linked image, and a read more link. The title link is likely optimal for SEO since it follows one of my most critical rules. Any image link is debatable - I won't get into it for this explanation. The read more link is likely created for two reasons: one - not to be confused as link spam (matching the title link), and two - to be user friendly. However, often the title link and the read more link have exactly the same target.

There is no SEO value to the read more link. It actually dilutes any juice from the title link. There is SEO value in the title link however, because it has been optimized.

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