Why I am a seeing an error for duplicate content for any categories and tags on my Wordpress blog?

[brytewire]

When I look under "Crawl Diagnostics" I see I have 12 errors for duplicate content and there are all from tags and categories.  I am assuming that search engines are reading the content in the tags and categories as duplicate.  Should I set my categories to "no-index?"

[brytewire]

Thanks.  I was using multiple categories and tags for the same post.  I believe this is causing my issue with duplicate content.  Appreciate your help.

[mad2k]

Hi Ryan,

Is your tags and categories are unique? I mean unique queries ... different content. You have to use tags carefully, differentiate them in posts.

Usually such a situation take place when the same tags are using for many posts and a tag query is the same. Also you should create good structure of a categories and draw attention to categories and tags were not identical. Good strategy is to build a category tree and good tag structure.

Category -  series of articles on the same topic/subject

Tag - unique connection, relational table, describes or defines some aspect of an information

Example.

Categories (New York Times):

- News

- - World

- - U.S.

- - POLITICS ...

etc.

Tags are usually use in searches or tag cloud:

Barack Obama, Apple, Natural Gas ... etc

It is pretty easy in WP blog in Posts menu. remember to write a description for each tag and category.

If you can't do it now to not lost earlier SEO work you can still use a solution described by Shane answer.

Good luck,

Marek

[PowersBusiness]

Yeah...if you're using a plugin like all in one seo or yoast, there are options in their settings that allow you to set tags and categories to no-index. That should make those duplicate content issues go away.