Solving link and duplicate content errors created by Wordpress blog and tags?
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SEOmoz tells me my site's blog (a Wordpress site) has 2 big problems: a few pages with too many links and duplicate content. The problem is that these pages seem legit the way they are, but obviously I need to fix the problem, sooooo...
Duplicate content error: error is a result of being able to search the blog by tags. Each blog post has mutliple tags, so the url.com/blog/tag pages occasionally show the same articles. Anyone know of a way to not get penalized for this? Should I exclude these pages from being crawled/sitemapped?
Too many links error: SEOmoz tells me my main blog page has too many links (both url.com/blog/ and url.com/blog-2/) - these pages have excerpts of 6 most recent blog posts. I feel like this should not be an error... anyone know of a solution that will keep the site from being penalized by these pages?
Thanks!
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Just to follow up on the "too many links" issue Lacy...
That error isn't just related to the number of posts on the page - it's taking the total number of links in all locations of the page added together.
So it's counting up the links in your primary navigation, in your sidebar, in your footer, everything.
So if you have a sidebar widget that's listing all your tags, categories, or even a blogroll, all those links are adding up. same with a footer full of links.
The reason this is a problem is that with so many links, the ability of the homepage to effectively pass it's authority along to the other important pages is diluted by all the less-essential links.
Make sense?
Paul
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I've had a clients website with only 20 tags on a 100 page website getting punished for duplicate content so try and 'no follow' things sooner rather than later.
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As David says, you can fix your duplicate content issues easily with Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. Here's a link:
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The duplicate content issue you can easily solve by installing an SEO plugin, such as Yoast's and noindexing the tag pages (you can also noindex categories, archives etc if you need).
I wouldn't have thought 6 excerpts would flag a too many links error, but if you're confident there aren't too many links, just ignore it.
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