Duplicate Content in Wordpress.com

[DoMiSoL]

Hi Mozers!

I have a client with a blog on wordpress.com.

http://newsfromtshirts.wordpress.com/

It just had a ranking drop because of a new Panda Update, and I know it's a Dupe Content problem.

There are 3900 duplicate pages, basically because there is no use of noindex or canonical tag, so archives, categories pages are totally indexed by Google.

If I could install my usual SEO plugin, that would be a piece of cake, but since Wordpress.com is a closed environment I can't.

How can I put a noindex into all category, archive and author peges in wordpress.com?

I think this could be done by writing a nice robot.txt, but I am not sure about the syntax I shoud use to achieve that.

Thank you very much,

DoMiSol Rossini

[MikeRoberts]

Depending on your theme (sometimes) you can change Tag Archives and Category pages to show a post summary instead of the full article... which can help but will not fully solve your problem.

If you could convince them to self-host instead of using WordPress's hosting then you'd be able to install an SEO related plugin that might help more to fix the problem.

Tag things less. There are a number of tags that have only 1 post associated with them. Take for instance the post from February 5th that has 8 tags, 5 of which go to Tag Archives that only have that one post on it.

Also, consider getting rid of the Tag Cloud because it just adds unnecessary and irrelevant links pointing to those Tag pages that are causing your dupe content problem and probably harming the flow of link equity through the site.

[mysayindia]

Hi Mike,

I have been looking for the solution since  a week almost .

My website http://mysay.in has over 3000 duplicate content issue and equal number of warnings and notices .. I am very new to the Moz world and SEO knowledge is close to negligible . My sit is hosted on wordpress.com as well. Now , after reading the solution I did remove the Tag cloud widget .. Will that help ?? and if you could suggest ideally how many tags for a post are optimum ? Will removing tags from previous posts and removing the Tag cloud remove these duplicate pages on its own or is there anything else I am supposed to do??

I am just confused . Please assist !!

Thanks

Vikash