WordPress Duplicate Content Caused By Categories
-
Hello,
We have a wordpress blog that has around 250 categories. Due to our platform we have a hierarchy structure for 3 separate stores. For example iPhone > Apps > Books.
Placing a blog post in the books category automatically places it into iPhone and iPhone/Apps category, causing 3 instances of any blog post in this category.
Is this an issue?
I have seen 2 schools of thought on categories, 1 index follow and 2 noindex follow. I know some of our categories get indexed, but with so many, maybe it is better to noindex them.
We also considered reducing our categories to 10 to 12 and use tags to provide the indexed site navigation as follows: Reviews (category) iPhone Book App, iPhone App Store (tags) but this seems a little redundant?
Anyone want to take this on?
thank you
Mike
-
Mike,
I specialize in on-site audits and related consulting - sent you a private message through the Moz member system just now about it...
Alan
-
Alan,
Excellent answer and we have been seeing slimmed down categories in our competitors, where they use tags to refine each post.
We are in need of some custom SEO consulting and training. We had a link audit and I am working on the results from that as far as Disavow goes. But, we need some specific site structure help, correct content creation help, and training.
Do you have any available services and available time in the near future for those services if we are a good fit?
thank you
Mike
-
This is definitely an issue. While there are many ways to go about resolving it, and each one has its own limitations and its own advantages, for most sites I recommend the following to my audit clients:
Reduce the number of main categories to as few as is reasonable where the ones that remain are the "bucket" or "umbrella" topics. An ideal number of categories would be anywhere from ten to twenty, at most. Any more than that overwhelms visitors and they become lost in the amount of time it takes to find what they want. Also, with too many categories, you end up with not enough individual articles in several of them, making those "thin".
Keep tag implementation to a minimum as well so there's not significant cross-over there. Each article should never have more than two, or at most three tags and tags should never be highly similar to categories or to other tags.
If any sub-categories exist, unless you can justify their value, it's best to noindex,nofollow those. Noindex,follow is NOT needed when those same articles are linked to from a bucket level category. And it confuses, weakens page rank distribution.
When you do this, it's important to 301 redirect old category indexes to point to their new consolidated versions.
Also, be sure to use proper pagination optimization on the remaining indexable categories using rel-next / rel-prev in accordance with Google's pagination guidelines.
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
-
Noticed a lot of duplicate content errors...
how do I fix duplicate content errors on categories and tags? I am trying to get rid of all the duplicate content and I'm really not sure how to. Any suggestions, advice and/or help on this would be greatly appreciated. I did add the canonical url through the SEO Yoast plugin, but I am still seeing errors. I did this on over 200 pages. Thanks for any assistance in advance. Jaime
Technical SEO | | slapshotstudio0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content > Wordpress Comments Page
Hello Moz Community, I've create a campaign in Moz and received hundreds of errors, regarding "Duplicate Page Content". After some review, I've found that 99% of the errors in the "Duplicate Page Content" report are occurring due to Wordpress creating a new comment page (with the original post detail), if a comment is made on a blog post. The post comment can be displayed on the original blog post, but also viewable on a second URL, created by Wordpress. http://www.Example.com/example-post http://www.Example.com/example-post/comment-page-1 Anyone else experience this issue in Wordpress or this same type of report in Moz? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | DomainUltra0 -
Wordpress New Category URL's
Were just about to redesign our site and put all the blogs over to the new site. Previously most blogs have been added to the uncategorised section of the blog and I'm now weighing up the benefit of sifting through all the blogs and changing them to relevant categories. From an SEO perspective would it be better to Leave them in their current category but start afresh with all new blogs by adding them to relevant categories? Work out which blogs should go in which new category and 301 all previous URL's to the new one. Obviously number one will take a lot more time than number two.
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Duplicate Content For Trailing Slashes?
I have several website in campaigns and I consistently get flagged for duplicate content and duplicate page titles from the domain and the domain/ versions of the sites even though they are properly redirected. How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
Duplicate page content errors in SEOmoz
Hi everyone, we just launched this new site and I just ran it through SEOmoz and I got a bunch of duplicate page content errors. Here's one example -- it says these 3 are duplicate content: http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-black-3inch http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-camel-3inch http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-gray-3inch You'll see from the pages that the titles, images and small pieces of the copy are all unique -- but there is some copy that is the same (after all, these are pretty much the same shoe, just a different color). So, why am I getting this error and is there any best way to address? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | ketanmv
Ketan0