Post Excerpts and the More Tag in WordPress

Not only once, it has been said that displaying full posts on your blog home page, category pages or archive pages increases the chance of being penalized for duplicate content.

In WordPress, using post excerpts has proven to be a good alternative, but one that has its downsides:

• You lose control over text formatting;
• Images won’t be displayed;
• If you don’t take time to write them yourself, WordPress might not select the most appropriate fragments;
• Readers might not be convinced to further click, if the excerpt is not attractive enough.

Better Post Excerpts

If you’re concerned about your writing style, you’ll most definitely take care about how you structure your posts, where you insert images and how you write the introductory paragraph.

With these in mind, you basically got yourself a very good post excerpt, one that you should not leave to WordPress to decide when and where to cut.

The ‘More’ Tag

This is the most valid alternative to displaying post excerpts, if the_excerpt() template tag does not fit your needs.

More is what the WordPress developers call a quicktag, designed to cut-off large posts into two fragments: one that will be displayed as an excerpt and one that users will continue to read from after clicking the “read more” link. It serves as a marker inside the post so that users who come from the excerpt link, will start reading the content from that point on, and not from the beginning, again.
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