Duplicate Content In Webmaster Tools

[Palmbourne]

In wordpress on some of our blogs when we have gone to publish them wordpress has shortened the url. In Google webmaster tools the orignal url is coming up as a 404 error. This url is not indexed in Google. Is this something to worry about and can this be avoided?

Thank you in advance.

[Essential-Pest]

If you do not edit the URL in WordPress yourself, it will make one for that blog post automatically. If Google webmaster tools is showing the original URL (long version) as a 404 error, it is because WordPress has a shortened version and Google is still reading the elongated one which does not exist.

To fix this, you can redirect the longer URL to the shorter URL with a 301 re-direct - or you can simply go and change the URL of that blog post to the longer version.

[Palmbourne]

Hi

Thank you for your response. I can not work out how to do a 301 re-direct in wordpress, I have looked but it appears to only show how to re-direct pages that are already there.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there. While you can add redirects by directly modifying the .htaccess file, there are a number of Wordpress plugins that can do this for you (and minimize the chance of breaking your site). You can also configure many of these plugins to automatically set up redirects for you, monitor 404s, etc. I recommend checking out the plugin Redirection (and testing it on a staged copy of your site first if at all possible.)

[Palmbourne]

Hi

Thank you so much for your recommendation for the Redirection plugin. I have installed it and it is working fine.