Duplicate content + wordpress tags
-
According to SEOMoz platform, one of my wordpress websites deals with duplicate content because of the tags I use. How should I fix it? Is it loyal to remove tag links from the post pages?
-
William
I wouldn't do that - make sure to just noindex tags, and also noindex subpages of archives. Categories can stay indexed, it's usually the subpages that cause issues (ie: /page/2/ etc).
-Dan
-
Hey There
I wrote a post which walks through how to decide what to do with tags. Essentially, here's what I would do;
(This assumes you have Yoast SEO for your SEO plugin).
- Noindex tags by default.
- Except set only the ones receiving traffic to index (this is the part you need Yoast for).
- Do not overlap your categories and tags (keep them different).
- Minimize tag usage in general - put a few on each post, but not too many more.
- You can use for navigation (like a tag cloud) if you think your readers will find them useful.
- Do not include them in your XML sitemap.
Hope that helps!
I also did this post on setting up WordPress for the Moz blog which you may find helpful.
-Dan
-
I also have the same problem, with categories and tags.
Should I add www.site.com/categories/ to the robots.txt or is that a bad idea?
-
I also wanted to mention...you might want to read this post. Cyrus Shepard suggested when I was asking a similar question and I think it really helps..
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions
-
If you're receiving very good amount of traffic then it will be a very bad idea to no-index tags, because you'll not receive any more traffic if you do so. i think you understood what it means by no-index, search engines will not index your tags.
For any site there would be 2 types of navigation:
-
through categories.
-
through tags.
Most People recommend using only one as a primary navigation and de-index other, since indexing both will cause duplicate content. There are some gurus like Yoast.com who recommend de-indexing both, which is the rule i'm following now.
So, i explained you what happens, if you feel that you're getting more traffic through tags, then you should de-index categories or viceversa.
If you need to index both, then i recommend you to wait for other pro members suggestion.
-
-
I'm dealing with similar issues on another platform (as are many others I'm sure) I would think twice before deleting them, especially if you are getting traffic from them. You have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages and realize it will probably never be "perfect"...something I personally have a hard time coming to terms with!
If you aren't using excerpts, (and instead, showing entire articles on index pages) that has helped immensely on a couple of websites I've helped in reducing duplicate content.
-
Thank you for your reply. Currently, I'm receiving good amounts of traffic to some www.domain.com/tag/blah-blah pages, will those pages be harmed if I make tags noindex?
-
Hi Giankar,
If Tags is not the Primary way of Navigation for your Blog, Then You can remove all your tags. I mean delete them. Otherwise you can no-index your tags so that it will not cause any duplicate content issues.
I hope this helps !
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
-
How to stop /tag creating duplicate content - Wordpress
Hi, I keep getting alert for duplicate content. It seems Wordpress is creating it through a /tag https://www.curveball-media.co.uk/tag/cipr/ https://www.curveball-media.co.uk/tag/pr-agencies/ Something in the way we've got Wordpress set up?
Technical SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
174 Duplicate Content Errors
How do I go about fixing these errors? There are all related to my tags. Thank you in advance for any help! Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisarein0 -
Question about duplicate content in crawl reports
Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0 -
Duplicate Content Penalties, International Sites
We're in the process of rolling out a new domestic (US) website design. If we copy the same theme/content to our International subsidiaries, would the duplicate content penalty still apply? All International sites would carry the Country specific domain, .co.uk, .eu, etc. This question is for English only content, I'm assuming translated content would not carry a penalty.
Technical SEO | | endlesspools0