Prevent Indexing of URLs Based on Tags

[williammarlow]

I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme.  Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have.  Is there any reason why this is a problem?  I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue?  Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me?

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[TomRayner]

Dan Shure wrote an excellent SEOMoz blog post about optimising wordpress earlier in the year.  It really goes into all the detail you could wish for, so rather than repeat it, I'd rather just post it!

Having just quickly reminded myself of the post, it provides you with the answer I think you're looking for.

[tdawson09]

I did a similar process a couple of years ago. I had a blog on Google's blogspot, and I set up a new, self-hosted wordpress blog and transferred all my blog posts over. Both sites were getting crawled, but the new site got no rankings until I blocked Google from crawling my old blogspot site. Google saw it as duplicate content and was only giving the old site ranking value.

[williammarlow]

Thanks guys. Very helpful.