Why do the crawl diagnostics indicate duplicate page content among blog postings hosted by WordPress?

[AndreaKayal]

Does anyone know why the crawl diagnostics indicate duplicate page content regarding the blog we are hosting on WordPress?  And does anyone know how to fix this issue?  The content is not, or does not appear to be duplicate.

[MikeRoberts]

Without more specific information like the website or pages in question I can only give you some general questions to look into... Have you checked on the specific pages that the crawls says are the duplicates? Since you're on Wordpress then it is very possibly caused by the Category archives, Tag archives, and Author archives still being Index, Follow and duplicating all of your posts. Also, do you have your blog set to show the full post or previews on the homepage and archive pages?

[AndreaKayal]

Hi Mike,

I just changed the setting to have the homepage show a summary only- thanks for the tip!

Regarding your other points- it seems as though you are right- the category, tag an author archives are still being indexed creating this issue.  Is there a way to stop them from being indexed?

Thanks!

[MikeRoberts]

A plugin like Yoast will give you the ability to set your archives to NoIndex, Follow which should alleviate your issues.

[AndreaKayal]

I would and that's a great suggestion, but we host on wordpress.com, not .org.  It's my understanding that you cannot add this plugin to .org.

Thank you for your help.

[AndreaKayal]

I mean to .com

[MikeRoberts]

Yeah... if you're using the Wordpress platform hosted through Wordpress instead of through an independent hosting solution then you can't add plugins so you're a bit stuck on that as far as my knowledge goes.