How to handle wordpress tags

[efink]

Hi fellow SEO mozzers,

I am getting 'duplicate content' errors when our site is crawled, mainly down to our WordPress blog and how we have handled tags. Currently, they are being crawled and as such are regarded as duplicate pages.

I have read several different articles on how to handle tags. Some suggest noindex the tag URL's.

Others suggest to optimize them and allow them to be indexed since Google has confirmed they won't penalize a WordPress site for having archive pages that publish and point to the same content. It will select the best link to represent the cluster of links.

Over the past few months, nearly 4% of our WordPress traffic have been referred by tag pages listed in search engines.

Initially I was going to noindex the tag pages, but going on the above info I wonder should I leave them as they are?

Or is the issue that having duplicate content will lead to inefficient crawling?

Any views/opinions on how best to handle this?

[ChrisDyson]

Personally I noindex all my category and tags in WordPress as I don't think they offer the best way for people searching for information to enter my blog. That being said I always believe that i****f a page is of use to a searcher, then you should include it within the index.

I know you have said that you are getting 4% of your organic traffic via tag pages but what's the quality of these visitors, do they have a low bounce rate or better than average time on site?

[efink]

The bounce rate isn't significantly higher than the site average and the time on site is similar to site average too...majority of the keywords are (not provided) so I can't see actual queries.

If I do decide to noindex tags, do I need to consider anything in the transition? like redirecting the tag pages that have been indexed to the equivalent post etc.?

[irvingw]

No, just noindex, follow them. Install the Yoast SEO plugin that will do the work for you with their presets.

[TommyTan]

Hi Sarah,

SEOmoz had a mozinar on Advanced Wordpress and they mentioned on how to handle tag pages, category pages and duplicate content.  I've added the attachment to the answer.

Basically can you simply go to the tag.php, archive.php, category.php files and change the the_content to the_excerpt then it should help with duplicate content. Whenever peopel visit the tag pages, instead of viewing the whole duplicate content there, they will only see an except and to read more, they will have to click on the post.

Hope this answers your question.

advanced-wordpress-seo

[evolvingSEO]

You can do this if you want to be really certain you won't hurt anything.

[evolvingSEO]

That's true, you can show excerpt which is better - but I believe ultimately the best bet is to noindex tags. Most people end up with hundreds or thousands of tag archives, all with just a few posts in them. If you're really good about using tag perfectly, it might work - but I think most sites benefit from noindexing them.