What's the best way to eliminate duplicate page content caused by blog archives?
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I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive.
Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct?
Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?
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I think I understand better now.
Use the noindex,follow tag on the content you don't want included in the search index.
If you are using Wordpress then you should check out http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
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The hypothetical blog posting I want to have indexed is...
www.example.com/blog/2011/10/19
The first sentence of this blog posting is: "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson."
I go out to google and search "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson." There are 7 results. The first result is the blog posting I want indexed. The 2nd - 7th results are archive pages from my blog. Let's call one of those archive pages...
So, residing on this archive page are all of my postings from October 2011 including Jim and Janice's. Thus, there appears to be a ton of duplicate content on my site.
If I implement a canonical tag on the archive page, won't this archive page be referred to the blog posting I want indexed?
If so, that won't work. I need the blog posting and all the archive pages to remain as is but I don't want the archive pages to be indexed or show up as duplicate content.
Thoughts?
-
The hypothetical blog posting I want to have indexed is...
www.example.com/blog/2011/10/19
The first sentence of this blog posting is: "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson."
I go out to google and search "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson." There are 7 results. The first result is the blog posting I want indexed. The 2nd - 7th results are archive pages from my blog. Let's call one of those archive pages...
So, residing on this archive page are all of my postings from October 2011 including Jim and Janice's. Thus, there appears to be a ton of duplicate content on my site.
If I implement a canonical tag on the archive page, won't this archive page be referred to the blog posting I want indexed?
If so, that won't work. I need the blog posting and all the archive pages to remain as is but I don't want the archive pages to be indexed or show up as duplicate content.
Thoughts?
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I agree with James, best to implement canonical tags.
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The best way would be to implement canonical tags on these pages,
Example from Google:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
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