Wordpress blog duplicate issue

[Trespass]

So after looking at the set up of the blog ive found this.

http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/

http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/news/

http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/general/

http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/snow/

Content shown on http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ can also be found on the other 3 urls.

The permalink structure is set up as /%category%/%postname%/ which I want to change to just %postname%

Obviously i want to make things as seo friendly as possible so any suggestions to do this right without losing any indexed pages etc. I have limited access to make changes to plugins etc aswell as these need to be done through the development company who manage our site.

Cheers

Robert

[TomRayner]

Hi Robert

Your best bet here would be to noindex and nofollow your site's category pages, in order to avoid duplicate content.

The easiest way to do this is with the Yoast SEO plugin.  I know you said you don't have much control over plugins, but I'd highly recommend this plugin in nearly all circumstances anyway.

Once installed, click on the SEO button on the left hand navigation in the admin area and then click on titles and metas:

http://i.imgur.com/jqw4fXc.png

Once there, click on the taxonomies tag and make your settings something like this:

http://i.imgur.com/STo93Sq.png

That will noindex and nofollow the pages, meaning that they won't be indexed with the duplicate content on your blog. You can also do the same on the "other" tab to noindex,nofollow author tags as well.

Hope this helps.

[Trespass]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your reply, I did think about no indexing the category pages but after reading this post http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success I thought otherwise.

Ideally I'd make quite a few changes to the blog setup but we are moving over to a magento site soon and then I'll have more control of the blog. I did a new post for "best ski jacket" which ranks on page 2 after 4 days. So right now I'm not sure how much of an issue the category pages are. Although the page that ranks is connected to a google plus profile so authority may play its part for now.

Thank for your feedback.

Robert

[JarnoNijzing]

Robert,

do you have the technical knowlegde to include a rel=canonical to the pages? Linking it to the /blog/page ?

The other pages, like archive etc, can then still show that page only they tell the search engines that the original post is in the /blog/ categorie.

Hope this helps some

regards

Jarno

[Trespass]

Hi Jarno,

Yes I have the tech knowledge to implement the canonical tag. Not sure which page you want to make canonical though? Each individual post?

All posts are found under http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ but each individual post can also be found under only one category. Im still going through a lot of the blog as i only started with this company 3 weeks ago.

A lot to look into

[JarnoNijzing]

Robert,

I think I misunderstood/misread your original question. I've just looked at your site again and noticed that the archive category also links to its original position. So no problem on that part.

As I now understand it you want to keep the categories but for url structure you want to exclude them right? So you want to shorten your url right?

regards

Jarno

[Trespass]

Hi Jarno,

I want to keep the categories and yes ideally shorten the urls. I thought about changing ther permalink structure to %postname% instead of the current /%category%/%postname%/

Also I think I could chnage the reading settings to show only snippets of each post and add cusotm category text to make each category url as unique as possible.

This post http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success advises to keep category pages indexed so making these unique as possible is most likely the best solution to avoid duplicate content.

The last thing I want to do is mess anything up. Although the blog itself doesntget much traffic anyway so I can only make it better. Already implemented a few changes including adding google authorship for each user which seems to have worked well. Already ranked a new post on page 2 for "best ski jacket" which was only published last week (date says may but this was altered in publish settings to keep another post sticky)

Thanks for your help.