Solving duplicate content with WP authors, tags, categories

[cgman]

I've been kind of neglecting wordpress installations on my websites and noticed many showing duplicate content for pages showing under author and tags, tags and single post, categories and single post.

Should this be a concern? Whats the best way of fixing this?

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks Sarah!

An alternative resource might be my article on Moz about optimizing WordPress for SEO

https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

There are also some prior Q&A threads that address duplicate content in WordPress:

• https://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-category-archives-index-but-will-this-cause-duplication
• https://moz.com/community/q/utilising-wordpress-attachment-pages-without-getting-duplicate-content-wwarnings
• https://moz.com/community/q/moz-analytics-telling-me-i-have-duplicate-content-issues-how-to-fix-this

Hope these help!

[msayle]

Seems the link in the above response is dead.

[AgentsofValue]

What I'd recommend are:

1.  you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages

2.  make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.

3.  determine your canonical url structure and stick with it

There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:

http://www.kidnapcustomers.com/how-to-make-a-website/wordpress-seo-duplicate-content-noindex-nofollow/

(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)

Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.