WordPress tags removed experiment

On one of my sites, I removed tags from the side bar and increase the number of related posts under each post.  I noticed more related post links increase page views more than almost anything.   Tags are not temping enough for readers, but having more related post seems to increase page views because it is connected to what the user was searching for anyway.

Simple tags

I created a seperate tag page with a link from my footer. This tag page contains my most popular tags.  There is actually a seperate plugin that will do this but I did it with wordpress simple tags.

The result of this WordPress test

The key thing is related post, not a busy side bar with a big tag cloud drives page views.  I am still testing this but so far it looks my page views have increased on my blog where I removed wordpress tags from the side bar.

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