How does Google handle read more tags in Wordpress

[gaben]

Hi Everyone

I am wondering how Google handles the read more tag in Wordpress. I pasted the link to a blog post on Google and found nothing (domain.com/post#readmore). Then I paste the version without #readmore (domain.com/post) and found that Google indexed the page but with the option to click "read more" to read it. The full blog post is not in their index, just the version asking you to read more.

Is this because Google hasn't gotten to it or is Google ignoring it. I am not sure but ideally I rather have the full blog post indexed, not the read more version.

I am curious to whether this will cause duplicate content issues. What are your experience with this and is it advisable to use an alternate method for read more. Maybe with a Wordpress plugin. Thanks in advance.

[gaben]

Love the detailed response. Thank you so much.

[becole]

Gabriel, the "readmore" URL is going to be the first URL that Google indexes, as that URL is typically on the "main blog page" of your blog. Since you update that page on a regular basis (by adding more posts) and the page has been around for a while, Google monitors that page and then updates it fairly quickly.

It takes more time for the blog post itself to get indexed, and socializing the post (such as Tweeting the URL) will get it indexed faster than just waiting for Google to crawl. There are a lot of factors that Google uses in order to determine indexing speed and pages that they add to the index, though.

Since you're using "read more", though, that is a good thing--generally you won't run into duplicate content issues because only a snippet of the post is on the site's main blog page (and category pages, etc.) and not the full blog post. So, that's a good thing.