Duplicate Content

[vansy]

The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress).

so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way.

thanks

[AndreVanKets]

Wordpress does this when you use tags....

Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different.

2 Options that i can think of.

1.) Remove the tags and strip the category segment in the URL and stop using them in future. This will require redirects from duplicate URL"s to the main article (this will take planning, allot of time and is quite complicated)

2.) If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages. This tells Google were the original page can be found. Tags are only their for user experience so you can set these to no-follow and no-index.

Greg

[vansy]

Thanks for the reply. Would this affect ranking or can it be left alone ?

[AndreVanKets]

Well, the duplicate content is causing issues alone.. Google does not like duplicate pages at all...

If you select which are your primary pages, and tell google to ignore the rest, it can only help your ranking.

With the Yoast SEO plugin, all you need to do is set tags to no-follow and no-index, and also strip the category from the URL. (it redirects automatically, as well)

Greg

[vansy]

Changed to Yoast. I ticked no follow on archives, categories, and tags. One hour later, website went from #7 to page four.

[AndreVanKets]

You should only no-follow your tags and archives and not your categories...

In the plugin settings, under permalinks, there is an option

"Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL." this will just stop the duplicate pages from appearing,

Blocking the category's must have caused the drop.

Greg

[evolvingSEO]

Justin

Sorry to hear of your trouble with making the new settings. For one, my guide on SEOmoz about setting up WordPress for SEO should be helpful. I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with that.

In these cases - the "duplicate content" is usually not the page its self but rather usually just the title tags.

This is because, imagine you have tag archives like this;

• mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/
• mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/2/
• mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/3/

Usually the title tags respectably end up being the same;

• Pink Elephants | My Domain
• Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 2
• Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 3

For every single tag "subpage".

Normally, the protocol would be to;

• Noindex subpages
• Noindex tags
• Noindex dated archives
• Disable author archives (single author blog only)
• Index categories

You can still link to tag pages and use tags within the site all you want, but you just don't want to index them.

These are just default settings. Its impossible to know exactly what you should be doing without seeing your site, but I hope all of that gets you in the right direction!

-Dan

[evolvingSEO]

Greg

Thanks so much for helping out! If you don't mind I'm just going to correct a few finer details so people don't confuse anything

"Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different."

Its totally true that this happens, but this is not what causes the duplicate content error in the crawl report. The errors are usually from sub-pages of any given tag archive having the same title tag.

"Remove the tags"

By this I'm sure you just mean noindex tags. You don't need to remove them from the site altogether, just remove them from the index.

"If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages."

You should leave categories indexed and noindex tags. Yoast does canonicals no matter what, you don't need to think about them and they are not what handles duplicate category pages.

Everything else stated is more or less ok but I just don't people to be confused.

Thanks again!

-Dan