How to group together blog posts/articles?

Question

What should be the general criteria to group together blog posts/articles?

I have just two ideas in my mind:

One - To group by date of publishing.

Two - To group by category.

On what type of blogs can we apply the above two groupings?

Also, is it sufficient to add a category, say Featured Articles, in terms of classification, when we analyze that certain blog articles are getting more hits?

Answer 1

Study how users are consuming the data on your website/blog, and group this data accordingly.

There is no one valid answer, since it depends on the precise context. For example, both of your proposals may be wrong:

• Grouping by date may not be useful because:

  1. One part of the users come from Google to read a single article, and then leave the website. Knowing that a week later you published an unrelated article is irrelevant for them.

  2. Another part of the users come regularly and read the articles they didn't read. All they need to know is whether they have read a precise article or not. The date is irrelevant neither.

• Grouping by categories may not be useful because in a given context, the blog posts are better tagged rather than put in a single, exclusive category.

But maybe in your particular case, the one or the other grouping makes totally sense.

Answer 2

I found a couple of links:

1. Topic Classification of Blog Posts Using Distant Supervision

2. Using Blog Tags to Benefit Your Readers and Your SEO

3. Using Categories and Tags Effectively on Your Blog

4. Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?

Blogger uses labels, a synonym to tags, to categorize or group posts.

So, it looks like a combination of category and tag cloud will be useful in organzing blog posts.