174 Duplicate Content Errors

[lisarein]

How do I go about fixing these errors? There are all related to my tags.

Thank you in advance for any help!

Lisa

[AndreVanKets]

Hi Lisa,

When viewing posts per tag, the content on that page is identical to the content on another page which is triggering the dupe content.

The general rule of thumb is to no-index your tag pages. If you're using wordpress, Yoast SEO plugin allows you to set the no-index tag automatically.

Greg

[marymerritt]

A little more information would help shape the responses you will receive here, but I will try and give you a general answer.

When you say, "related to my tags" - do you mean that "tag" pages (in WordPress presumably?) have been marked as duplicates because they contain the same text content as posts on the site? If so, I have found that it is useful to only show an excerpt of the post content on the tag pages.

Alternately, many people disallow Google from indexing their tag pages, because generally they are not important enough to justify optimization, and they don't need to be included in the index - they often have only duplicate content on them.

If you are indeed using WordPress, any number of SEO plugins will allow you to mark tag pages as "noindex" - I like to use the Yoast SEO plugin.

[BlueLinkERP]

I just posted a question on this topic but I find it hard to believe that Google would penalize duplicate content created through Wordpress tags considering it is in such widespread use and the average person would never think to fix the issue.

Also, be careful if your tags are generating traffic for you. We have several tags that rank well in Google so we wouldn't want to lose that traffic.

[marymerritt]

That's a decent point - it's likely they're able to tell when a page is a "tag" page, and automatically factor that in when indexing - this doesn't change the fact that it gets flagged as a problem with a Moz crawl, though

[lisarein]

I have adjusted the indexing in SEO Yoast.  So I will see what happens next time it gets crawled.  Thank you for the great answers and so quickly as well!