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Hello, Check your website with "Screaming Frog Spider", with it you will get all the info you need ( broken links, duplicated content etc... ). The problem may be already solved but google still has the "cached" version of your website which contains the errors Br //Oliver

Hi Irving, Thanks for your reply.  I will go ahead and speak to my programmer about implementing the NOINDEX, FOLLOW and Rel=Cannonical parameter.  I paid Yoast for an analysis and of course they recommended their plugin. My programmer tried to implement it, but he said the plugin did not work with templates we were using for implementation of local city code we have.  Additionally, the Yoast team said their plugin doesn't work with forums ("as Wordpress doesn't contain a forum and it is unreasonable for the Yoast plugin to support another plugin."  So we would have to back out code we have to integrate our forum into our sitemap.  I don't know what we would do if we used the Yoast plugin.  It was getting very complicated.

We are just starting several new sites.  We chose Yoast for SEO.  It has taken our sites up for 8 months from almost no traffic to 5-10 times the traffic in about a month.  If that continues it will be grand. The version we are using is new and its features rich for a non-expert.  For instance, Google+ is easy to implement putting my pic up on Google SERPs.  It provides an effective and consistent SEO interface for all pages, posts, categories and tags if you are using them with an SEO status red yellow green light that can be sorted - and easy to use SEO page tools integrated.  I like it. Now, if I had lots of custom programing as it sounds you do, you may want to gradually integrate the product or just use the basics. Yoast's model is simple to operate, but his approach is fairly comprehensive for such a complex "black art" as SEO.  I think Google will respect his work in the end as an honorable approach to SEO for the average WP site. No doubt it is not a panacea, nor right for everyone, but it seems his formula is sound and easy to implement and I can say so far it is working for me. www.apalytics.com corp site www.cio-tech.com executive blog www.synsynack.com network analysis blog I feel that it is well worth the effort to invest in the Yoast model. Bill Alderson

My pleasure Gerald. Isn't this a great community for help and answers to our seo problems? Im looking forward to mozcon next month. All the best.

A delayed thank you, yet a thank you nevertheless for some good recommendations.  My programmer is reviewing the Yoast SEO module and running into these types of issues that Yoast really can't help with.  We have a long list of issues we are addressing.  I'll write more when I know more as to our ultimate solution.  But you present some helpful options.

As EGOL says, it isn't black hat. It may be duplicate If you think google cares about duplicate content on different domains, find an Associated Press story, then search for that headline. You will find it on 100 sites. If google cared about duplicate content on multiple sites, none of those would show up in the serps. However, and there is always a however... if they don't like your site for some other reason, they may bury your site in the results if you have duplicate content that appears on other sites.

Nice if you can get your tags to reflect the broad range of topics covered by your site, but I think sometimes it can give a visitor the perception that your content is a little thin when you only have one article against each topic. Say you're reading an article, you see that it's tagged with the topic you're interested in, click on that tag and only get the one article that you've just read. When deciding on tags to use, try and think of how your visitors may wish to explore your content. Remember to try and maintain an external perspective and use tags that are meaningful to your visitors. If you've got the time and enough traffic to give you the info, you could use your analytics data to see how people are using tags vs. site search for example. Of course, as you point out, this doesn't have anything to do with the duplicate content problem.