Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Solving duplicate content with WP authors, tags, categories
-
I've been kind of neglecting wordpress installations on my websites and noticed many showing duplicate content for pages showing under author and tags, tags and single post, categories and single post.
Should this be a concern? Whats the best way of fixing this?
Thanks
-
Thanks Sarah!
An alternative resource might be my article on Moz about optimizing WordPress for SEO
https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
There are also some prior Q&A threads that address duplicate content in WordPress:
- https://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-category-archives-index-but-will-this-cause-duplication
- https://moz.com/community/q/utilising-wordpress-attachment-pages-without-getting-duplicate-content-wwarnings
- https://moz.com/community/q/moz-analytics-telling-me-i-have-duplicate-content-issues-how-to-fix-this
Hope these help!
-
Seems the link in the above response is dead.
-
What I'd recommend are:
1. you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages
2. make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.
3. determine your canonical url structure and stick with it
There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:
(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)
Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.
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
-
How to allow bots to crawl all but WP-content
Hello, I would like my website to remain crawlable to bots, but to block my wp content and media. Does the following robots.txt work? I worry that the * user agent may conflict with the others. User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Tom3_15
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/ User-agent: GoogleBot
Allow: / User-agent: GoogleBot-Mobile
Allow: / User-agent: GoogleBot-Image
Allow: / User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: / User-agent: Slurp
Allow: /0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
How do I handle duplicate content of the same product in Multiple product categories?
I am building a BigCommerce store for selling framed art. Many of the pieces of art will fall in more than one product category. Let's say I have a framed print of a photograph of a western landscape. This piece of art would fit into these categories; "western", "landscape", and "photography". I would have three pages with duplicate content for just this one framed print. Will google give me less page rank due to this? Can all the link juice be given to just one of the three categories by use of rel=canonical? If so, does anyone know how to do this for a bigcommerce site? I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks, Kelly
Technical SEO | | Kelly_S0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Geotargeting duplicate content to different regions - href and canonical tag confusion
If you duplicate content onto a sub-folder for say a new US geotargeted site (to target kw spelling differences) and, in addition to GWT geotargeting settings, implement the 'Canonical' and 'Hreflang' tags on these new pages to show G different region and language version (en-us). Then does the original/main site similar pages also need to have canonical and href tags ? The main/original sites page I don't really want to target a specific country (although existing signals (hosting etc) will be UK (primary target of main site) but pages show up in other country searches too (which we want). Im presuming fine to leave the original/main site as it currently is although wording in google blog/webmaster central articles etc are a bit confusing hence why im asking for anyone elses opinion/input on this. Also is there are any benefit (or just best practice) to use 'www.example.com/en-us/...' in the subdirectory URL as opposed to just 'www.example.com/us/' many thanks in advance to any commentators 🙂
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Block Quotes and Citations for duplicate content
I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way. This is what I read: http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content? I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit. It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales. I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer. I want to do this for a contact lens site. I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions. Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well. Would this be the best method? Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it? On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own. Cheers, Vinnie
Technical SEO | | vforvinnie1