Duplicate Content in WordPress Taxonomies & Noindex, Follow

[CoreyHicks]

Hello Moz Community,

We are seeing duplicate content issues in our Moz report for our WordPress site’s Tag pages. After a bit of research, it appears one of the best solutions is to set Tag pages to “no index, follow” within Yoast. That makes sense, but we have a few questions:

In doing this, how are we affecting our opportunity to show up in search results?

Are there any other repercussions to making this change?

What would it take to make the content on these pages be seen as unique?

[donsilvernail]

The problem you are experiencing is due to archives pages that are created every time you create a new tag, category, author, or other types of archive pages. The issue occurs when you tag or categorize the post or page. For instance, "Why Do We Need SEO" is your first ever post on your website and you tag it with SEO Best Practices, and you categorize it has SEO. You will have 3 archive pages with duplicate content. The author page, the SEO Best Practices page and the SEO page. This is because each archive page only consists of the same post "Why Do We Need SEO". So as you write more posts the duplicate pages may disappear depending on how you organize your content. If you create lots of tags and tag everything chances are you will always have duplicate content.

To not get a penalty you should no index these archive pages. But if you are disciplined with your organization of tags and categories. You will not have a problem.

Thanks,

Don

[andy.bigbangthemes]

Hey there. Have a look at this post please. I believe it has everything you'll need to know. Thanks again for the help, Don!

https://moz.com/community/q/different-wp-taxonomies-seen-as-duplicate-content

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Corey

Don pretty much nailed this answer. I'll make sure to answer your specific questions:

• You're not negatively affecting your ability to show in search by noindexing tags. They almost never rank or get traffic since they are just pages of thin content. Noindexing them does not affect your other pages.

• No other repercussions - unless you have a random tag archive getting traffic. Check your analytics, and if so, you can individually leave specific tags indexed with the Yoast plugin. I wrote a post all about this a while back: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/

• You would have to figure out how to have unique title tags on each page - which is honestly more effort than is worth it. The Moz tool is showing an 'error' of duplicate content but the issue is just more that tag pages don't have much value and can just be noindexed and then ignored.