Wordpress tags and duplicate content?

[howlusa]

I've seen a few other Q&A posts on this but I haven't found a complete answer. I read somewhere a while ago that you can use as many tags as you would like. I found that I rank for each tag I used. For example, I could rank for best night clubs in san antonio, good best night clubs in san antonio, great best night clubs in san antonio, top best night clubs in san antonio, etc. However, I now see that I'm creating a ton of duplicate content.

Is there any way to set a canonical tag on the tag pages to link back to the original post so that I still keep my rankings? Would future tags be ignored if I did this?

[YouON]

I think you have to avoid putting all these tags. Create a single tag "Night Clubs in San Antonio" and work with content (tag description, tag title) and inbound links to optimize a single page for a couple of key phrases.

If you want to set rel=canonical you can use the Conditional Tags.

[MikeRoberts]

The SEO benefits of Tags tends to be negligible. Mainly they work together to help the user experience by tying together similar articles and increasing a visitor's time of site and pages viewed by offering them similar content that may draw their attention. The biggest problems with Tags (especially on Wordpress) is if you don't set them to NoIndex and have artciles to show Full instead of a Snippet on the archive page. When this happens you create a duplicate version on every Tag archive attached to the post, the Author archive, the category archive and the homepage. And a one-off tag with no other posts associated with it becomes useless because it creates more duplicate content without effectively tying your article to any other similar posts.

I almost always tell people with Wordpress blogs to switch posts to showing snippets on homepage and archives to lessen duplication, NoIndex archives, and (where possible) clean up & remove useless one-off tags that you don't think you'd use again and plan new content to add to the one-off tags you would use again.

[howlusa]

Ok so it's possible to set the rel=canonical on each tag page to point to the main post. Will I still rank for the tags and it won't be considered duplicate content?

[howlusa]

I still don't understand... I read this on Managewp.com:

Google (and other major search engines) will never penalize a WordPress site for having archive pages that publish and point to the same content. They confirmed this way back in 2008.

So.... can I still have all my tags? Is there anything wrong with having a lot of tags if I just show the excerpt? Or am I going to be penalized for duplicate content?

I don't want to lose the rankings I already have because of my tags by noindexing them, and I don't want to prevent getting future rankings because they're not indexed. But I also don't want to be penalized. Help!

[YouON]

rel=canonical tells Google do not index this page because is a sort of duplicate content of this other one, the original one. I think, as I said, to optimize one tag page for 2/3/4 similar key phrases and you probably can do a redirect 301 from a couple of tag pages to the one you want to rank.

To avoid big mistakes I think it is a good idea to put original content in these tag pages. Use the tag description, and the excerpts (or custom fields) to give some original preview of the posts.

[evolvingSEO]

It is true they will not "penalize" for tags or archives directly, but you can make your site much better by doing many of the things Mike recommends above.

I wrote a post talking through how to assess your tags, and deciding which ones to delete and/or noindex: here.

Here's the elephant in the room too, you may rank for those tags, but do they bring traffic? What is the on-site metrics for your tag traffic? Bounce rate? Time on page?

It is true you may rank for some tags, but in general they never provide traffic, or the right traffic, compared to the content its self.

-Dan