Google is at the forefront of creating innovative products which ultimately have the objective to make the user experience of being online better (while making money on the side, of course). Within Adsense, I noticed a feature I had not used before simply because I had never noticed it before being matched content. It’s a feature by Google for which I am a little unsure about whether it really will improve your website’s performance. Here’s a little about the matched content units.

What are Matched Content Units?

Matched content units display related articles being the article title, with the option of an image. With this, the aim for these units is to prevent web users exiting your website after reading the content and try to keep them on the site by recommending other articles that they may find useful. For this reason, the matched content units are very similar to the units that third party websites, such as LinkWithin, provide. For this reason, is it worth choosing Google’s Matched Content units over other programs such as LinkWithin? Here are my main thoughts towards Matched Content.

#1 Articles Displayed will be Contextual

One of the best bits about Google is that they really know how to understand the web user. If he or she searches for one thing, Google’s algorithms that they have created can cleverly determine what the web user is likely to do next (with the help of some machine learning too). With this in mind, you can be sure that the articles are chosen by Google, from your website, to be displayed in the matched content units will be the most related to the article the web user is currently reading.

#2 Google will Always Adopt SEO Title, though

Unfortunately, this is, from my perspective, quite a big problem. Google (and third party related post widgets, for that matter) will only ever display the SEO title for an article which is not always what you want web users to see if they are already on your website.

For example, one of my websites, FreePoemAnalysis.com, obeys a certain structure for all articles of ‘Analysis of [Poem Name] by [Poet’s Name]’. On the website, though, the web user will know every article is of a poem analysis. Therefore, they will only want to see ‘[Poem Name] by [Poet’s Name]’. The problem with Google’s matched content is that it cannot do this, so matched content unit will display a list of, what seems like, repeating articles with the same structure – this is not very pleasant to look at on the eye. With an inbuilt related posts widget with the theme, I can choose either the SEO title or shortened title to display for related posts which is much more preferable.

Ultimately, I think it will depend on what type of website you have. If you were previously using a related posts widget such as LinkWithin, it might be worth giving matched content from Google a go. After all, they do display reports of how the units are performing which will provide yourself a deeper understanding of the metrics on your website.