WordPress Duplicate Content Issues

[wparlaman]

Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc...

My question is, how do you handle these issues?

Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc?

By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages?

I hope this makes sense.

Regards,

Bill

[EGOL]

The WP on my blog is set up as follows (this is a blog that gets between four and ten short posts per day - about two to four sentences, each post linking to an article or other content on a topic-related website)

Homepage:  Full text of the most recent 25 posts are displayed.  Pagination pages are not indexed (blocked by robots.txt).

Post Pages:  Full text is displayed and the title plus a few words of 20 related posts are displayed.

Category Pages:  I have over 100 categories and each post is placed into at least two categories (one by location and one by topic).  Some posts go into three or four categoreis - sometimes more.  Each category page displays the full text of the most recent 25 posts.  Categories do not have pagination pages (blocked by robots.txt).

All of the above pages are fully indexed and a long list of category pages appears in the left-side navigation.  I don't use tag pages or archive pages.   There is a lot of dupe content in this system but so far I am lucky that it does not cause a problem.   The category pages pull a lot of organic search traffic.

In January of each year I delete all of the posts that are over a year old.  Before doing that I identify those that are pulling reasonable traffic and either redirect them to a permanent page about same topic, write an article about that topic and redirect, or recycle that post.  All the rest are redirected to the homepage of the blog.

[blu42media]

Bill-

There are several SEO plugs available for WP that will handle these issues.  Yes, you are right that adding "noindex" will be beneficial on tag, category, and archive pages.  The idea here is avoiding duplicate content issues.  BTW, check out: Yoast SEO for Wordpress.

Here is how the values for the robots meta tag work:

• noindex will keep a page from being crawled
• nofollow will prevent a page's links from being followed

I agree with noindex'ing these pages; though I would argue that a nofollow is still worth leaving out.  If these pages have any juice you want to allow this to flow to the other links on the page.

[WilliamBay]

I posted this article I wrote the other day for someone asking a similar question.

http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

With the Yoast SEO Plugin I no-index everything except Categories. You can see how I set mine up under section 3. Indexation.

Here is the original question that Sha submitted:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-with-wordpress-dupe-issues

[holdtheonion]

Unless I'm missing something here, wouldn't it be easier to set the canonical tag for the main post? There are also plugins like SEO Ultimate that handle this automatically.

[ChatterBlock]

Most of the Plugins for wordpress use canonical urls.

[Rogeroz]

Thanks for article,

Now 2 years ahead, are there any important updates for preventing duplicate content/titles?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Bill

I like to start with this standard setup (image/chart from my wordpress post on moz);

Pages, Posts, Categories - Index

Tags, Dated Archives, Subpages, Author Archives - noindex

You can check out the full post - I will be updating the Yoast Screenshots very soon!

-Dan