Why I am a seeing an error for duplicate content for any categories and tags on my Wordpress blog?
-
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?"
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Does duplicate content not concern Rand?
Hello all, I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can. I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc. I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues. Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?" Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem. Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with. My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question: E.g. Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there): https://moz.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/ https://moz.com/rand/category/moz/ Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves. I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect? I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever! Any help much appreciated, Thanks
Technical SEO | | sbridle1 -
Duplicate title/content errors for blog archives
Hi All Would love some help, fairly new at SEO and using SEOMoz, I've looked through the forums and have just managed to confuse myself. I have a customer with a lot of duplicate page title/content errors in SEOMoz. It's an umbraco CMS and a lot of the errors appear to be blog archives and pagination. i.e. http://example.com/blog http://example.com/blog/ http://example.com/blog/?page=1 http://example.com/blog/?page=2 and then also http://example.com/blog/2011/08 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=1 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=2 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=3 (empty page) http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=4 (empty page) This continues for different years and months and blog entries and creates hundreds of errors. What's the best way to handle this for the SEOMoz report and the search engines. Should I rel=canonical the /blog page? I think this would probably affect the SEO of all the blog entries? Use robots.txt? Sitemaps? URL parameters in the search engines? Appreciate any assistance/recommendations Thanks in advance Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
Duplicate Content in Wordpress.com
Hi Mozers! I have a client with a blog on wordpress.com. http://newsfromtshirts.wordpress.com/ It just had a ranking drop because of a new Panda Update, and I know it's a Dupe Content problem. There are 3900 duplicate pages, basically because there is no use of noindex or canonical tag, so archives, categories pages are totally indexed by Google. If I could install my usual SEO plugin, that would be a piece of cake, but since Wordpress.com is a closed environment I can't. How can I put a noindex into all category, archive and author peges in wordpress.com? I think this could be done by writing a nice robot.txt, but I am not sure about the syntax I shoud use to achieve that. Thank you very much, DoMiSol Rossini
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Caps in URL creating duplicate content
Im getting a bunch of duplicate content errors where the crawl is saying www.url.com/abc has duplicate at www.url.com/ABC The content is in magento and the url settings are lowercase, and I cant figure out why it thinks there is duplicate consent. These are pages with a decent number of inbound links.
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
What's the best way to eliminate duplicate page content caused by blog archives?
I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive. Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct? Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?
Technical SEO | | ICM0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230