Blog archives vs individual articles

[DavidSpivac]

In a client's blog, you can find each individual article pages as well as aggregate of articles per month or sometimes per day (including each entire article).

The problem is that the article appears twice, once in a dedicated page (article page) and once with other articles (in the archive).

Is there a specific SEO approach to this type of situation? Is there duplicate content?

What page name should I give each archive (if at all), as there are quite a few?

Thank you

[jeffreytrull1]

I would add a "noindex" tags to the archive pages and leave the article page alone. If it's the same archive setup I'm thinking of, there's little value to leaving this in the Google index so that's it's searchable.

Are you using WordPress? This can be easily done with the Yoast SEO plugin.

[DavidSpivac]

Thank you for your input, it is helpful.

Do you think I should simply do "noindex" or should I also say "follow" or "nofollow"?

Thanks

[jeffreytrull1]

I'd leave it as "follow" since there's no reason to make it "nofollow" in this case. I believe that's what Yoast recommends via the plugin as well.

[DavidSpivac]

Thanks a lot Jeffrey,

Very helpful!

David

[EGOL]

I believe that Google is smart enough to know that millions of blogs have article pages, category pages and archive pages.

If your blog posts are unique content of substantive length and you only include a snippet on the category and archive pages then it is unlikely that you will suffer a duplicate content problem.

If you do have a duplicate content problem it will more likely come from scrappers grabbing your content or republishing your feed (that has full post content).

My approach is to allow indexing of article pages, category pages and index page but block only the pagination of the index and category pages.

If I blocked indexing of category or article pages I would lose thousands of visitors per day.

[DavidSpivac]

Thank you Egol,

I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.

For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.

[EGOL]

I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.

I use the title and about 20 words.  I use WordPress where that is possible.

For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.

I would try to use the first 20 words or first sentence if possible.  If not possible I would move to a different content manager.

Just my two cents.

[DavidSpivac]

Thank you Egol.

Your insights were very helpful.

David