Topics

Contents

• Get Your Content to Appear in Topics
• Missing Posts

Related

• Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed
• Getting More Views and Traffic
• Search Engines
• Sitemaps
• Stats
• Technorati
• Webmaster Tools
• WordPress.com Search

The Explore Topics section of your reader displays the subjects that are most popular with bloggers on WordPress.com.

Selecting photography, for example, will display all the most recently published posts that have been tagged or categorized as “photography.”

You can browse any topic that’s not listed, including specific people, places, and things, using the search box in the corner. Try adding your hometown, favorite musician, or hobby to try it out.

Click Follow to add a topic to your reader so that you have quick access to all the latest posts about that subject.

Get Your Content to Appear in Topics

Add up to 15 relevant tags (or categories) to your posts before you hit publish, and your content will appear on those topic pages. Tags and categories should be used to summarize what each post is about. For example, if you’re posting a recipe for apple pie, you could tag it with “recipe,” “apple,” and “pie.” If you’re having trouble choosing tags, try thinking about what tags you would search for if you wanted to find a similar post.

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Missing Posts

If you have published a new post and it isn’t showing up on topic pages for the tags and categories that you’ve used, there are several possible explanations:

1. You are using too many categories or tags. In most cases, there’s no need to assign more than a handful of tags per post. If you use more than 15 tags (and categories, total), your posts will not appear on topic pages (because you don’t want to see irrelevant content showing up there, and neither do we).

2. Your blog is private. Check the Settings -> Privacy tab of your dashboard. You must choose the first option, I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, for your blog to be included on topic pages.

3. Your blog is mature or offensive. If you regularly post material that is offensive, not safe for work, or not suitable for minors, we might have flagged your blog as mature. Mature blogs are not included in the global tag lists. Please contact support if you think your blog might have unfairly been flagged as mature.

4. You are misusing the global tag feature. If you’ve been regularly using the “knitting” tag on posts about Britney’s latest scandal, your blog might have been excluded from topic pages for a while.

Other examples of misuse include:

• Using misleading or irrelevant tags
• Posting affiliate links, marketing material, duplicate or low quality content
• Attempting to push a post to the top of the tag results by changing the publication date multiple times

Check our policies regarding quality content and try to use appropriate tags and categories. Your blog will automatically be re-included on topic pages after you have regularly posted with appropriate tags for a while.

5. Your blog is very new. It can take a few days before new blogs are included on topic pages. Brand new blogs might not have enough posts for us to accurately determine whether or not they’re spam.

6. Your blog is set to a different language other than English. Therefore you need to use a different URL to find your post. Just change the ‘en’ in http://en.wordpress.com/#!/read/topic/yourtopic to the abbreviation of your language. A German (de) topic page would become http://de.wordpress.com/#!/read/topic/yourtopic. Here you can find a list of languages we support on WordPress.com.  

Last modified: May 15, 2012