Block /tag/ or not?
-
I've asked this question in another area but now i want to ask it as a bigger question. Do we block /tag/ with robots.txt or not. Here's why I ask:
My wordpress site does not block /tag/ and I have many /tag/ results in the top 10 results of Google. Have for months. The question is, does Google see /tag/ on WordPress as duplicate content? SEOMoz says it's duplicate content but it's a tag. It's not really content per say.
I'm all for optimizing my site but Google is not penalizing me for /tag/ results.
I don't want to block /tag/ if Google is not seeing it as duplicate content for only one reason and that's because I have many results in the top 10 on G.
So, can someone who knows more about this weigh in on the subject for I really would like a accurate answer.
Thanks in advance...
-
Thanks for all the info. Last question, does having a list of monthly archives on the bottom of my site hurt in terms of dup content? I just have at the bottom the month/year and when you click it, it shows all the posts in that month. Should I be removing this or does it matter?
-
It would be meta noindex. Yoast is my plugin of choice. Happen to have a little article right here if you need to see if its "safe" to remove them from a traffic standpoint.
-Dan
-
I use All in one SEO pack and have checked noindex for the tags and the categories and the archives. I suppose it doesn't make any difference if I do it there or in the robots.txt file. Either way their being blocked. Do you know if there's a penalty for having blocked them in WP and the robots file?
-
I'd say noindex, follow them - many SEO plugins can do this for you, Yoast SEO for example. That way Googs can still crawl them, which may assist with discovery, but won't index them.
-
Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!
So, I suppose the best and proper way to block it is by robots.txt correct?
-
You mean "more about this" than me? I run 3 businesses on 3 Wordpress blogs. I've done the research. Many of my clients are Wordpress users. But here's what others think:
- Yoast thinks it's duplicate content: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#advancedseo
- David Fuller ranked for tags then didn't: http://www.seomoz.org/q/wordpress-tags-duplicate-content Same link Dan at Evolving thinks you should noindex tags as well.
- WPMU and Matt Cutts think it's duplicate content: http://wpmu.org/categories-tags-and-how-to-avoid-duplicate-content-on-wordpress/
- How to Tech thinks it's duplicate content: http://howtotechtips.com/remove-wordpress-duplicate-content-search-results-and-tags-from-google/
- As you said, SEOMoz thinks it's duplicate content.
- Many Warriors suggest noindexing tags for dupe content reasons: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/373744-wordpress-tags-death-me-duplicate-content-question.html
- 3 other pro SEOs say to noindex here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/solving-link-and-duplicate-content-errors-created-by-wordpress-blog-and-tags
Google search shows
_No results found for _"tags do not create duplicate content".
No results found for "tags are not duplicate content".
And 2.5 million results for tags "duplicate content"
The short term answer is that you're ranking for them now so leave them be.
The long term answer is it's duplicate content and you need to fix it.
Even if your tag pages don't show the entire post, multiple tag pages show the same excerpt. This is duplicate content. By itself - not even talking about the post.
**You said: **_SEOMoz says it's duplicate content but it's a tag. It's not really content per say. _
If you want to see with your own eyes the duplicate content, please post a URL.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I am trying to generate GEO meta tag for my website where on one page there are multiple locations My question is, Can I add GEO tagging for every address?
Am I restricted to 1 geo tag per page or can i add multiple geo tags ?
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Alt Tags - how important for SEO?
Hi I know alt tags should be on an image, however at the moment I have 23,741 missing on the site, how important are these? It's a big project for someone to update & I need some justification Thanks Mozzers 🙂
Technical SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Setting title tag with javascript/jquery
Hi there, I'm looking for some advice. I've recently implemented a few jQuery functions which gets specific content from the page and then sets the title and description. See working example here. It seems to work fine but my question I have is whether Google bots can read it and whether it might actually hinder my SEO efforts? Any advice would be really appreciated! Peter
Technical SEO | | peterallen0 -
How to redirect my .com/blog to my server folder /blog ?
Hello SEO Moz ! Always hard to post something serious for the 04.01 but anyway let's try ! I'm releasing Joomla websites website.com, website.com/fr, website.com/es and so on. Usually i have the following folders on my server [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/com/fr [ROOT]/com/es However I would like to get the following now (for back up and security purpose). [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/es [ROOT]/fr So now what can I do (I gues .htaccess) to open the folder [ROOT]/es when people clic on website.com/es ? It sounds stupid but I really don't know. I found this on internet but did not answer my needs. .htaccess RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | AymanH
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(^/fr/.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /sites/fr/$1 [L,R=301] Tks a lot ! Florian0 -
Duplicate title-tags with pagination and canonical
Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?
Technical SEO | | MagicDude4Eva2 -
Title tag code
Hi, I have a couple of websites where I can't define the title tag (CMS does not support it) on a few default pages. On these pages "the system" just uses the primary/main title tag (from the frontpage) and my programming skills (as if I have any...!) have not been able to make a html code or something to override the main title tag on these specific pages. Does this make sense at all and can anyone give me a hint, a code to try out or something? Problem is that I now have 3 pages with the same title tag which in terms of SEO isn't too good, so to say... Thanks in advance. Jan
Technical SEO | | Wello12340 -
Build links to / or without ./ on root
Hi there for linkbuilding what is better, building with / or without / www.domain.com www.domain.com/ I have been told it depends what your webserver is doing, also i was told they are the same? what does Google see? I know i need to stay consistent, just wondering which practice is better? Any help as always much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Yahoo/Bing Search
Are there current articles that describe the differences in Yahoo/Bing vs Google SERPs? We have solid top 10 rankings in Google for a bunch of competitive keywords but aren't ranking well in Yahoo.
Technical SEO | | blueroom0