Duplicate pages

[WallerD]

Hi I have recently signed up to Moz Pro and the first crawl report on my wordpress site has brought up some duplicate content issues. I don't know what to do with this data!

The original page : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/blog/

and the duplicate content page : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/author/david/

If anyone can point me to  a  resource or explain what I need to do thanks!

David.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi David,

I will be very quick here. 'rel=canonial' can come to your rescue.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Here is another article from Moz regarding duplicate content and how to go about it:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[WallerD]

Hi Devanur, thank you for your response.

I have read that the 301 redirect passes more link juice to the original page. Although I am still trying to figure out how to actually physically do it!

I know you can use a plug in for wordpress, have you had any experience yourself implementing the rel'canonical' or 301 redirect?

Best wishes.

David.

[Devanur-Rafi]

You are most welcome David. You can use Yoast for Wordpress for handling rel=canonial.

Here for more: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/#canonical

Here you go for implementing 301 permanent redirection using .htaccess file on Apache server(Linux hosting):

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/redirects/setting-up-a-301-permanent-redirect-via-htaccess

If you are on a Windows server, here are the steps for 301 redirection:

http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httpredirect

301 redirection is definitely faster than rel=canonical and almost same when it comes to passing on the SEO goodies to the canonical page. With 301 in place, in this case with the URLs mentioned by you for example(suppose, the author page is redirected to the homepage via 301), no one will be able to see the author page as it would take you to the homepage but with rel=canonical in place, everyone will be able to see the author page and its just that the search engines like Google will not index the author page as the cononical or the preferred page would be the homepage. So, ideally, you should be going with the rel=canonical implementation here. Hope it helps.

Good Luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[evolvingSEO]

David

You have Yoast SEO installed, so follow these steps;

1. Go to SEO->Titles/Meta->Other
2. and for "author archives" check "noindex, follow"
3. and if this is a single author blog, check "disable author archives"

For more details on setting up WordPress for SEO, you can check out my guide here: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

-Dan

[David-Kley]

301 redirects are processed through your htaccess file, and your server. Here is an example of what the code looks like. This particular example is used to force "www" on our site, so that a user cannot access multiple versions of the home page: (btw if you don't have this in place, you should)

force www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.webdesignandcompany.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The # symbol allows the description to be ignored, so that you can organize your htaccess rules easily, and have them labeled.

If you use cpanel for hosting, or have a host provider that uses it, here is how to process through the backend admin:
http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/ReDirects

"I know you can use a plug in for wordpress, have you had any experience yourself implementing the rel'canonical' or 301 redirect?"

Super simple, so don't sweat it. By using the Yoast SEO Plugin, you can set the canonical page directly from the page's editor. 
Here is the link explaining how to do just that:
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/canonical/

Hope this helps! If you need any further assistance let me know.

[WallerD]

thank's guy's I will let you know how I get on!

Best wishes.

David

[David-Kley]

Just wanted to add that he may want to process the 301's, even after setting the plugin correctly, as Google may have already indexed a lot of the non-SEF and author pages. On the new canoncial pages, it's probably a good idea to also check "no-archive" so the search engine only shows the most recent result.

David, for you to reference:

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

Best of luck with your edits!

[evolvingSEO]

Awesome - thanks for all the extra info David!

Just to clarify, do you mean 301 the author archives to the homepage? Yoast does this when you check "disable author archives".