Blog archives vs individual articles
-
In a client's blog, you can find each individual article pages as well as aggregate of articles per month or sometimes per day (including each entire article).
The problem is that the article appears twice, once in a dedicated page (article page) and once with other articles (in the archive).
Is there a specific SEO approach to this type of situation? Is there duplicate content?
What page name should I give each archive (if at all), as there are quite a few?
Thank you
-
Thank you Egol.
Your insights were very helpful.
David
-
I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.
I use the title and about 20 words. I use WordPress where that is possible.
For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.
I would try to use the first 20 words or first sentence if possible. If not possible I would move to a different content manager.
Just my two cents.
-
Thank you Egol,
I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.
For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.
-
I believe that Google is smart enough to know that millions of blogs have article pages, category pages and archive pages.
If your blog posts are unique content of substantive length and you only include a snippet on the category and archive pages then it is unlikely that you will suffer a duplicate content problem.
If you do have a duplicate content problem it will more likely come from scrappers grabbing your content or republishing your feed (that has full post content).
My approach is to allow indexing of article pages, category pages and index page but block only the pagination of the index and category pages.
If I blocked indexing of category or article pages I would lose thousands of visitors per day.
-
Thanks a lot Jeffrey,
Very helpful!
David
-
I'd leave it as "follow" since there's no reason to make it "nofollow" in this case. I believe that's what Yoast recommends via the plugin as well.
-
Thank you for your input, it is helpful.
Do you think I should simply do "noindex" or should I also say "follow" or "nofollow"?
Thanks
-
I would add a "noindex" tags to the archive pages and leave the article page alone. If it's the same archive setup I'm thinking of, there's little value to leaving this in the Google index so that's it's searchable.
Are you using WordPress? This can be easily done with the Yoast SEO plugin.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
I want to transfer an old Blogger blog onto my new site
When we first started out our website didn't have a blog and we started one on Blogger. It has loads of great content on it but it was before the days when I understood SEO so it's 4 years old and has maybe 1000 views per blog article. Now I want to repurpose some of that great content and SEO optimise it and put it onto my new site. How do I go about this from an SEO perspective. I am aware of internal competition and will only be using the old blogs that are new topics to start off with so it doesn't negatively impact my rankings. Should I just delete the old blog and re-write it all on the new one or redirect the old blog articles to the new pages and rewrite them? The blogger articles have no links to them and it's just content that I'd like to use. The old blog has almost no SEO value at all but I want to use a best practice approach to not cause any damage to my new blog or have google thinking I'm stealing someone else's content.
Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool0 -
Full Ecommerce vs seperate shop section
Just wondering is anyone had any thoughts on whats the easiest for SEO purposes. My main focus is to get people to buy our installation services. We could either a) Have a full ecommerce website and on every product we can advertise the fact that we install the products. As well as creatign additinal CMS pages OR b) Create a content driven site promoting our installation services and then having a separate tab at the top which can be very prominent called Shop or Buy online. The customer can then visit that page for DIY products. Would either option be a better option for SEO purposes/usability for the customer?
Technical SEO | | paulfoz16091 -
Dates in the blog posts - on, off or regularly updated
Hello Moz community, We have a blog where we post what we believe is very valuable, unique content for our niche. The content frequently stays very relevant for our visitor for many many years. In terms of both user engagement and SEO, should we keep the dates in our blog posts? Should we remove them? Should we go through every blog post and edit it slightly every week even if there is no meaningful information we can add? Should employ some kind of plugin that does update the blog post date automatically?
Technical SEO | | SirMax0 -
Internal duplicated content on articles, when is too much?
I have an automotive rental blog with articles that explain the pros of renting a specific model. So in this articles the advantages of rental versus the buying of a new model. This advantages are a list with bullets like this:
Technical SEO | | markovald
Rental | Buy new car
Rental:
Free car insurance
Free assistance
etc.
Buy new car
You have to pay insurance
You have to pay assistance
etc. etc. I want to do this because i want to make all articles like landing pages...
This "advantages box" have 100 characters. The general length of articles on my blog is 500/600 characters. So i have an average of 15/20% internal duplicated content on all my articles. Is this bad for seo? Any alternatives?0 -
SEOMoz Crawler vs Googlebot Question
I read somewhere that SEOMoz’s crawler marks a page in its Crawl Diagnostics as duplicate content if it doesn’t have more than 5% unique content.(I can’t find that statistic anywhere on SEOMoz to confirm though). We are an eCommerce site, so many of our pages share the same sidebar, header, and footer links. The pages flagged by SEOMoz as duplicates have these same links, but they have unique URLs and category names. Because they’re not actual duplicates of each other, canonical tags aren’t the answer. Also because inventory might automatically come back in stock, we can’t use 301 redirects on these “duplicate” pages. It seems like it’s the sidebar, header, and footer links that are what’s causing these pages to be flagged as duplicates. Does the SEOMoz crawler mimic the way Googlebot works? Also, is Googlebot smart enough not to count the sidebar and header/footer links when looking for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | ElDude0 -
Should i do "Article Marketing" for my quotes site?
Hello members, Should i do Article Marketing for my quote site to have quality backlinks to my site? will it improve my rankings?
Technical SEO | | rimon56930 -
Should I ping Each New Article And How Will It Help Me
Hi I am looking for advice to get my new articles out there and my news stories. I would like to know if i should ping my articles and news stories each time i write a new one and if so which ping services do you recommend and what do they really do. Can anyone recommend any other services that i could use to promote my new articles and news stories to gain more traffic. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848861