What is with WordPress Dupe issues?

[ShaMenz]

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone can explain for me why it seems every tag that is entered in WP blog posts on a site creates a duplicate page (identified by ROGER and friends in SEOmoz crawl)?

Obviously if you can offer a solution (apart from the extremely obvious "don't use tags") I would be immensely grateful.

Thanks so much,

[WilliamBay]

What happens when you use tags is that you create a page that is called www.your-domain.com/tag/tag-name. You also have the original blog post which is www.your-domain.com/blog-post.

They have two completely separate URLs, but they have the exact same content.

This is exacerbated when you use multiple tags because you increase the amount of chances for duplicate content to be created. And again it's even more expounded when you take into account the Categories, and Date Based Archives.

The solution is to use something like the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and use no-index for everything that you don't want indexed. In my case I want Categories indexed, so I no-index Tags and Date Based Archives.

If you use Yoast's plugin I have put together a fairly easy article on how to initially set it up, and it is pretty helpful in understanding some of the settings. It's geared mainly for photographers running their own site, but should be just as valuable to you.
You can find it here http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

[ShaMenz]

Thanks William,

I figured this was what was happening, but I suppose I imagined since it is obviously going to create duplicate content issues that the WP people would have been smart enough to make it add a canonical tag or something.

Thanks for the info on the plugin - much appreciated!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey William

That's a great answer, thumbs up.

Marcus

[WilliamBay]

You're welcome Sha.

I wish I knew Matt Mullenweg so I could ask him the same question. I plan to be at the WordPress Camp here in San Diego in July, so maybe I'll ask around and try to get to the root of why there has never been an inherent "canonical setting."

Maybe they figured Google would sort out which is the canonical (which it will). But I would much rather say what path, or what keyword anchor Google has to crawl through to get to the post.

[WilliamBay]

Thank you Marcus! And I just saw your tweet. That's super awesome of you.

I'll let the owner of the site know.

[ShaMenz]

That's great!

I'll keep an eye out for news on the subject 

thanks again,

[Hurf]

Good Answer and a great article on your site too! Kudos!