Duplicate content nightmare

[MobileDay]

Hey Moz Community

I ran a crawl test, and there is a lot of duplicate content but I cannot work out why. It seems that when I publish a post secondary urls are being created depending on some tags and categories. Or at least, that is what it looks like. I don't know why this is happening, nor do I know if I need to do anything about it.

Help? Please.

[Todd_McDonald]

Hey MobileDay -- any chance you'd be willing to share the site you're looking at so I can help diagnose the issue? Also, what tool did you use to run the crawl test? What exactly did you crawl?

[rjonesx. 0]

Hey,

I took a peak and it looks like most of your duplicate content is coming from /tag/ issues in Wordpress. Luckily, this is very easy to solve, especially since you have Yoast SEO  plugin in place.

1. Log into wordpress admin for your site.
2. Click on the Yoast SEO plugin in the left-hand navigation
3. Choose "Titles and Meta"
4. Choose "Taxonomies"
5. Click "noindex, follow" under "Tags"
6. Choose "Save Changes"

This will tell Google that your tags pages are useful for categorization and linking but do not contain unique content. Your other alternative is to add content to your tags pages that makes them unique. If you do a good job of creating truly useful tag pages, they can become very important parts of your SEO strategy. You need to be careful, though, so as not to create sprawling, thin-content sections of your site. Here is a decent guide on the practice.

HTH

[MobileDay]

Hey Todd. MobileDay.com is the website and the crawl test was using the Moz tool. Crawled the entire domain.

[MobileDay]

Wow, thank you very much. I will read up on that link.

[Todd_McDonald]

I'm sure Russ has you covered - no reason for me to look into this. Just wanted to make sure you didn't think I'd forgotten you :).

[rjonesx. 0]

No problem!

[rjonesx. 0]

Thanks for helping out on Q/A! It is hugely helpful to have professionals answering questions here!

[Todd_McDonald]

You bet Russ. I appreciate what you guys do and am happy to participate and share as I can!