Duplicate Page Content WordPress blog with categories?

[frankthetank2]

Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content".  Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages.  None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories.

Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error?  Any thing I should be doing differently?

Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

I would ignore it. Duplicate content is accpeted happens here and there, its when you have lots of it you need to worry.

When you have 2 pages near the same, only one will be choosen by search engines to rank, do a search and make sure you home page is comming first for the duplicate content if not then you might want to look at a canonical tag,/

[allenspence]

I am new to this too and had the same issue/result on my WP site.  Would it be possible/best to noindex the categories so that the duplicate notent is not indexed at all by Google??

[AlanMosley]

no, dont no index, if you do you will lose all link juice flowing into those pages.

first choice dont do anything, there is no penalty, the duplicate at worst will be ignored. if you want to make sure your home page is not seen as the duplicate use a canonical tag.

if you ever no index a page, dont do it with robots, but if for some reason you have to, use a neta tag "noindex, follow" so link juice can be returned. But i find very few occasions when you should no index.