What's the best way to tackle duplicate pages in a blog?

[Sangeeta]

We installed a WP blog on a website and the below result is just an example. All of them lead to the same content. What's the best way to resolve it?

http://www.calmu.edu/blog/
http://www.calmu.edu/blog/calmu-business-spotlight-veev/
http://www.calmu.edu/blog/category/business-buzz/

[j0a0vargas]

I think this plugin solves your problem, I don't use wordpress a lot, I prefer joomla  but I've heard this for WP:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/

You can use this script on header.php to make to:

if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){

echo '';

} else {

echo '';

}

I would prefer to use the plugin, because you can make others things god to SEO on-page

[DeptAgency]

Usually creating a 301 redirect in your HTAcces file is an effective way of dealing with duplicate content. You could use the free redirect generator if you're not too familiar with writing htaccess files.

http://www.htaccessredirect.net/index.php

[BWIRic]

I'd make sure you have canonical links too. Google has a page dedicated to them here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

[ParagonDigital]

Hi Sangeeta,

It looks like you are using the Wordpress All-in-One SEO Pack which should take care of most duplicate pages in Category and Archives using canonicalization.

Both of these pages:

http://www.calmu.edu/blog/calmu-business-spotlight-veev/
http://www.calmu.edu/blog/category/business-buzz/

have this line added by the SEO Plugin which tells the bots that the page in the blog directory is the real page and to consider the category and archive versions of the page the same page.

rel="canonical" href="http://www.calmu.edu/blog/calmu-business-spotlight-veev/" />

The home page on a blog is always going to have some duplication for the recent posts. The only thing I know of that you could do for that would be to have Wordpress display blurbs for the post with a read more link instead of the whole post on the home page.

[Sangeeta]

Thanks a lot @ParagonDigital. This issue was detected after the SEOMoz crawl of the website and they are listing all these pages as duplicate pages.

[Sangeeta]

I did see this page but I was unsure of how to guide my developer on putting canonical links. Can you help?

[Sangeeta]

Do you think it would work. What are the negative aspects of using a redirect?

[Sangeeta]

Thanks Joao. Are you saying blogs on joomla platform do not have this problem?

[j0a0vargas]

No, almost all blogs have this kind of problem, joomla also. But in Joomla i'm more accustomed to solve them. On Joomla i use YOOtheme ZOO that is a great Blog tool, for SEO I use Acesef, which is integrated to ZOO. I can configure this duplicate problem on Acesef Zoo Extension easily.

But using WP you will find a lot of plugins for SEO and will solve this : D

[Sangeeta]

Thanks..