WordPress Duplicate Content Issues
-
Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc...
My question is, how do you handle these issues?
Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc?
By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages?
I hope this makes sense.
Regards,
Bill
-
Hey Bill
I like to start with this standard setup (image/chart from my wordpress post on moz);
Pages, Posts, Categories - Index
Tags, Dated Archives, Subpages, Author Archives - noindex
You can check out the full post - I will be updating the Yoast Screenshots very soon!
-Dan
-
Thanks for article,
Now 2 years ahead, are there any important updates for preventing duplicate content/titles?
-
Most of the Plugins for wordpress use canonical urls.
-
Unless I'm missing something here, wouldn't it be easier to set the canonical tag for the main post? There are also plugins like SEO Ultimate that handle this automatically.
-
I posted this article I wrote the other day for someone asking a similar question.
With the Yoast SEO Plugin I no-index everything except Categories. You can see how I set mine up under section 3. Indexation.
Here is the original question that Sha submitted:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-with-wordpress-dupe-issues -
Bill-
There are several SEO plugs available for WP that will handle these issues. Yes, you are right that adding "noindex" will be beneficial on tag, category, and archive pages. The idea here is avoiding duplicate content issues. BTW, check out: Yoast SEO for Wordpress.
Here is how the values for the robots meta tag work:
- noindex will keep a page from being crawled
- nofollow will prevent a page's links from being followed
I agree with noindex'ing these pages; though I would argue that a nofollow is still worth leaving out. If these pages have any juice you want to allow this to flow to the other links on the page.
-
The WP on my blog is set up as follows (this is a blog that gets between four and ten short posts per day - about two to four sentences, each post linking to an article or other content on a topic-related website)
Homepage: Full text of the most recent 25 posts are displayed. Pagination pages are not indexed (blocked by robots.txt).
Post Pages: Full text is displayed and the title plus a few words of 20 related posts are displayed.
Category Pages: I have over 100 categories and each post is placed into at least two categories (one by location and one by topic). Some posts go into three or four categoreis - sometimes more. Each category page displays the full text of the most recent 25 posts. Categories do not have pagination pages (blocked by robots.txt).
All of the above pages are fully indexed and a long list of category pages appears in the left-side navigation. I don't use tag pages or archive pages. There is a lot of dupe content in this system but so far I am lucky that it does not cause a problem. The category pages pull a lot of organic search traffic.
In January of each year I delete all of the posts that are over a year old. Before doing that I identify those that are pulling reasonable traffic and either redirect them to a permanent page about same topic, write an article about that topic and redirect, or recycle that post. All the rest are redirected to the homepage of the blog.
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
-
Duplicate Footer Content Issue
Please check given screenshot URL. As per the screenshot we are using highlighted content through out the website in the footer section of our website (https://www.mastersindia.co/) . So, please tell us how Google will treat this content. Will Google count it as duplicate content or not? What is the solution in case if the Google treat it as duplicate content. Screenshot URL: https://prnt.sc/pmvumv
Technical SEO | | AnilTanwarMI0 -
Issue with Title of Homepage - Wordpress Platform
I can't seem to get Google to read the title of my homepage the way I would like it to be read and I have double checked in all areas of my Wordpress Platform where the title may be defaulting and all it set up correctly. I have also ensured that the "force re-write of titles and meta descriptions" have been checked through a plugin I am using to monitor SEO (Yoast)... here is an example of how Google is reading my homepage title: XYZ Company: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company I would like it to read: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company But for some reason it keeps pulling in my website title. I have always re-submitted my URL to Google but no luck with the title change. If anyone has any insight as to why this is defaulting as such I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
Dear All I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with. Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too. It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead? Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong) All the best Matt
Technical SEO | | MattByrne0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Is there ever legitimate near duplicate content?
Hey guys, I’ve been reading the blogs and really appreciate all the great feedback. It’s nice to see how supportive this community is to each other. I’ve got a question about near duplicate content. I’ve read a bunch of great post regarding what is duplicate content and how to fix it. However, I’m looking at a scenario that is a little different from what I’ve read about. I’m not sure if we’d get penalized by Google or not. We are working with a group of small insurance agencies that have combined some of their back office work, and work together to sell the same products, but for the most part act as what they are, independent agencies. So we now have 25 different little companies, in 25 different cities spread across the southeast, all selling the same thing. Each agency has their own URL, each has their own Google local places registration, their own backlinks to their local chambers, own contact us and staff pages, etc. However, we have created landing pages for each product line, with the hopes of attracting local searches. While we vary each landing page a little per agency (the auto insurance page in CA talks about driving down the 101, while the auto insurance page in Georgia says welcome to the peach state) probably 75% of the land page content is the same from agency to agency. There is only so much you can say about specific lines of insurance. They have slightly different titles, slightly different headers, but the bulk of the page is the same. So here is the question, will Google hit us with a penalty for having similar content across the 25 sites? If so, how do you handle this? We are trying to write create content, and unique content, but at the end of the day auto insurance in one city is pretty much the same as in another city. Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | mavrick0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230 -
Are RSS Feeds deemed duplicate content?
If a website content management system includes built-in feeds of different categories that the client can choose from, does that endanger them of having duplicate content if their categories are the same as another client's feed? These feeds appear on templated home page designs by default. Just trying to figure out how big of an issue these feeds are in terms of duplicate content across clients' sites. Should I be concerned? Obviously, there's other content on the home page besides the feed and have not really seen negative effects, but could it be impacting results?
Technical SEO | | KyleNeuberger0 -
Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0