Are there any negatives to generating a short list of ‘related posts’?

Matt's answer:

Matt Cutts: Alain-Christian or Alan-Christian  – I apologize if I’m mangling names –  in Queens, New York, asks, ‘Are there any negatives to generating a short list of “related posts”‘? I don’t see any negatives as long as it’s a short list so it’s not 200 or something like that. So two, three, four, five related posts, perhaps. Users can find that really, really helpful. So for a long time I ran a related post plug in on my Word Press blog. The user gets down to the bottom of the post and then they say, ‘Okay. What am I gonna do now? Am I just gonna leave or hey, here are some really useful related posts?’ And then they can spend more time browsing your site. So if you look in Google Analytics, you can see your bounce rate and I said, ‘Okay. I’m gonna try to get my bounce rate down just for fun. I’m gonna see if I can keep people on my site a little bit longer.’ Things like related posts give people a good reason to stay on your site and help them explore and find and discover more of the great content on your site. So, in my opinion, it’s fantastically useful. Think about even something like YouTube. You watch a video and then you see all of these related videos down on the side. So if you can entice people to spend a little more time on your site and show related videos or related posts, that can be a great thing for them. They have a good time, they learn more and it can be a really good thing for you as well.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: