Duplicate page content/page titles on tages

[Jasonalanmagic]

Hello everyone.  New to the community and loving it already.  Question, I am receiving an error of 6 pages with duplicate content and page titles.  A majority of these are tag pages.  Should I be worried about these?  IN the column listed duplicate urls it is listing 0 ( screen shot: http://screencast.com/t/azvuVk0ucWt)  Are these tags a problem?  Will SEO be hurt because of this?  What are TAG pages? Actually pages, categories, should I eliminate these?

[dotfly]

Tag pages are normally used by larger websites, especially those who publish news frequently. Tag pages should help visitors of a website to find those pages they might be interested in. 
Within CMS environments like wordpress (and others) the use of tags, categories and archives is very common. So the risk of creating DC is very high if you do not do your SEO homework right.

If you are confronted with DC under the circumstances you describe, there are several ways to avoid that or solve the problem:

1. Meta Tag „noindex, (no)follow“ to archive, categories, tags and search results (or just let your subpages not be indexed)

2. Use rel= prev/next (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html)

3. Use of canonical tag (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html)

4. Some people just use “sites” and no archives, no tags, no posts (easy to avoid DC then but not the perfect solution for using the power of your CMS)

Please keep in mind, that YOU should decide which method fits better for your purposes! E.g. some people want their archives to be indexed and they don`t want to disclaim to use posts etc. etc.

by the way: if you use wordpress there is a plugin from Yoast which can help you to clean up the structures...

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Jason

Glad you are liking the community so far! I would recommend starting with this post I did for Moz to help answer exactly these questions about WordPress and SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

When you're starting out and have just a few tags (6 isn't much) it's not a huge deal, but for some sites as they grow it turns into 300+ tags without planning on it - then it's a little more of an issue. Not something that would cause a penalty per se, but just not great for the site to have those extra pages indexed and existing because they don't generally add any value (they are often similar to the posts themselves).

I would use maybe 3-4 tags tops for any blog post. They are little detailed words to describe the content. Additionally, tags only have a utility if used as navigation in the site somehow: either a list of popular tags in the sidebar or sometimes you can click on the tags for each post at the bottom of the post.

Lots of people try to make tags to rank in search engines but I have found this to be a bad strategy. In general, I recommend people to noindex tags as shown in the article. With the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress you should also "noindex subpages of archives".

Categories - I would create 5-7 categories that you will file all blog posts into - and only use those and don't let categories grow (don't keep adding new categories). You can customize your category pages with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-custom-category-pages/ - and indexing them is fine.

Good luck!

-Dan