Crawl Diagnostics Warnings - Duplicate Content

[skehoe]

Hi All,

I am getting a lot of warnings about duplicate page content.  The pages are normally 'tag' pages.

I have some news stories or blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'.

Should I ask google not to index the tag pages?  Does it really affect my site?

Thanks

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Stacey

It all depends on how these tag pages are used and whether they factor as landing pages or are just a tool for people to view related content once on the site.

Are you using WordPress? If so, WordPress features a bunch of taxonomies, tags being one and where you have posts by a single author they may be duplicated on the homepage, date archive, author archive, categories, sub categories and tags so you can end up with a lot of pages that look pretty much the same.

This is fairly straightforward to resolve though and if you just install the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and then noindex any pages that are really just for users to browse you can ensure your important pages remain indexed and there is not lots of duplication or competition.

Really, it is more than a technical problem and it comes down to how you organise your posts and content on the blog and a default blog root and specific indexed category pages (ideally with some additional, unique content) can work best (but again, the specifics depends on the blog and the content).

Anyhow, it is an easy change, try no indexing the tags, date archives, author archives etc and using some smart category organisation and see if it moves the dial at all for you. You can always put things back if you don't find it helps.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[skehoe]

Thanks Marcus.

It is wordpress I am using and already have the Yoast WP plugin. I'll try nondexing the author and date taxonomies too.

I have done so with the tags but they still show up on the SEOmoz report.

Good idea about varying the categories - will give that a go and see if anything changes