WordPress Duplicate URLs?

[JasonMOZ]

On my site, there are two different category bases leading to the exact same page. My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress, and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true?

Here's an example of the correct url. and...

Here's an example of the same exact content, but using a different url.

Notice that one is coming from /topics and the other is coming from /authors base. My understanding is that this is bad. Am I wrong?

[BCutrer]

It can be, especially if there is a lot of content on the site doing it. I would also be worried in this case because of the content is short (could be seen as thin) and is common quotes so it is probably duplicated on other sites. I would lean toward cleaning it up.

Yoast has a great tool for fixing this. That or I would noindex one category.

[Ray-pp]

My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress

WordPress does tend to create duplicate pages. However, they can be easily managed/prevented.

and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true?

You definitely need to worry about duplicate content - especially when there are auto-generated pages, category pages, author pages, and tag pages.

In your site the /authors/fear URL has "http://www.quotery.com/topics/fear/" set as the canonical URL. So, the developer did add a correct canonical setting to try and prevent duplicate content issues. However, a canonical setting is only a suggestion for the search engines and they do not necessarily adhere to the settings. Therefore, since the pages seem identical, I suggest noindexing the /authors/fear page.