What is the value in Archiving and how can I avoid negative SEO impact?

[GerryWeitz]

I have been very busy reducing GWT duplicate content errors on my website, www.heartspm.com, created on a Wordpress platform.

Each month, blog entries are being archived and each month is generating a duplicate description by Google.  We post 2-3 blog entries per month and they don't really go out of date.  Most are not news related butr rather they are nuggets of information on entomology.

Do I need to use the archiving feature?  Can I turn it off?  Should I switch to archive perhaps once per year instead of every month and how is that done?  How do I stop Google from creating its' own meta-description, duplicates each month for these archive entries?  Should I have the archive as NOINDEX, FOLLOW?  I'm not the programmer, but I have some technical know how, so I have a lot of half baked ideas and answers that could use some polishing.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Gerry

[GerryWeitz]

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.

[irvingw]

get the YOAST seo plugin and you can handle the archive pages by noindex,follow like you mentioned. If you allow them to get indexed you're just creating duplicate content. The plugins also allow you to set canonicals to help avoid duplicate content as well. Very simple to install and no programming background needed, although you might need FTP access to upload the plugin to the plugins directory.