I have a WP site which uses categories to display the same content in several locations. Which items should get a canonical tag to avoid a ding for duplicate content?
-
So...I have a Knowledge Center and press room that pretty much use the same posts. So...technically the content looks like its on several pages because the post shows up on the Category listing page.
Do I add a Canonical tag to each individual post...so that it is the only one that is counted?
Also...I have a LONG disclaimer that goes at the bottom of most of the posts. would this count as duplicate content? Is there a way to markup a single paragraph to tell the spiders not to crawl it?
-
Hi Kane,
Thank you so much for your quick response even in the holiday season, I really appreciate that. I don't think that there is any unique content on tag or category pages. I will go ahead and noindex them right away.
Once again, thanks for your help.
Happy Holidays...
Jatin
-
Hi Jatin,
If you have any kind of unique content on a tag or category page, then it's reasonable to index it. For example, a category page with 1-2 paragraphs of intro text explaining what types of content are found in that category. In this case, any posts or post teasers showing up on that category/tag page would not be unique content.
If there is no unique content on that page, then I'd suggest noindex for category and tag pages.
-
Hello Kane,
I am also facing this issue and found some answers here in Q&A section. Most of the members are recommending to make tag & categories page non-index. But, you are not recommending this. Do you think that in the matter of duplicate content issue, it is better to non-index the tags and categories page?
If not, then should I worry about the duplicate content issues about these pages?
-
Let's resolve the boilerplate disclaimer text first: it is fine to have a section of content that is duplicated on lots of blog posts - the most important consideration is that each page has a decent amount of unique text from all other URLs on the website. Now there are limits to this - if every post has 200-400 words unique content (not really enough) and the boilerplate is 500 words, then your balance is off in that ratio. If you have 300-1000+ unique words on post and boilerplate text that is <100 words, then I would not worry about that at all. However, you can use the tag that Nick mentioned if you want to - it shouldn't hurt anything.
Now, regarding the canonicalization of posts and how it relates to category/archive pages:
Each post will have its own canonical tag, for example:
- http://www.domain.com/blog/best-post-ever/
- http://www.domain.com/blog/big-announcement-new-product
- http://www.domain.com/blog/annual-company-report
Then each category page or archive page would have it's own canonical tag:
When you are viewing a category or tag or archive page that lists a bunch of posts - there is only one canonical tag visible in the code for that page, and it's for the page itself - not for the posts listed on the page.
I'm guessing you're asking this question because you read that duplicate content on category and tag pages was common, and that is true. However - canonicals are not involved in fixing this at all. The thing with Wordpress is that unless you built a theme yourself - you shouldn't have to touch any of this. Default Wordpress with Yoast SEO plugin installed will handle this for you. I have worked on hundreds of Wordpress sites for 10 years and can count the number of times I manually specified a canonical tag in Wordpress on one hand.
The duplicate content of two pages such as your knowledge center and press room should be mitigated by 1) reducing the number of posts that fall into both categories, 2) making sure there is some unique content (50-300 words) on the knowledge center and press room pages other than a list of blog posts, and 3) not stressing too hard about duplicate content on these pages.
Hope that helps, please feel free to respond with questions if I missed something.
-
Hi Lindsay,
I'd recommend limiting the number of categories you select for each post - generally my rule is 3 categories maximum. That being said, I've found that the most successful strategy is to create & categorize content in a way that easily satisfies your user's intent. Categories = broad topics/areas of interest your ideal buyer wants to read about (broad keyword search phrases). Articles/posts = focus on one specific question related to the broad category (longtail phrases).
For example: let's say you have a shoe company and you've created a style blog that discusses the latest trends. One option is to do what a lot of companies do, and choose generic blog categories like trends, inspiration, comfort, etc...
Let's say you research and decide write an article called: Best Shoes To Wear To Coachella (because it's a longtail keyword). How do you categorize it? It's definitely goes in trends, but it's also kind of inspirational, and you also have a section about comfortable shoes to wear to Coachella. You can't choose just one category, so you end up adding the post to 4-5 categories.
The biggest problem with this type of organization structure is not duplicate content - it's that users (a) can't easily find your content because they don't know what your categories mean and (b) they're confused about what content they've already read, because they see the same articles in multiple categories.
In my opinion, the better way to choose categories and article topics, as I sort of mentioned above, is to start with broad topics that people want to learn about.
Instead, you might choose categories based on popular search queries. For example: Festival Shoes, New This Season, Celebrity Favs, How To Wear It, etc. In this case, your article: Best Shoes To Wear To Coachella would go under the festival shoes category. You could also have articles about Stagecoach, SXSW, etc. This isn't the best example, but I hope this make sense!
Long story short: done correctly, this type strategy is helpful in a number of ways: (1) your user is able to easily understand where to find the information they're looking for, (2) you avoid duplicate content, because your articles are written to correspond with 1 (maybe 2) categories, and (3) your category pages will be hyper-optimized for lots of longtail keywords that are related to your main category keyword. This will make your category pages like mini-landing pages that have a higher probability of ranking broad/more competitive keywords.
I hope this helps!
-
Hi Lindsay, Good questions. My recommendation would be to place a cononical tag on your posts and consider setting your category page to noindex.
As for the disclaimer, you can wrap that in the following tags to tell Google that it should not index that specific content.
<code>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</code>
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
-
Explore by site - Site overview's servers
Hello, When I want to "Explore by site" and make a "Site overview", I have only 4 choices for the region : USA United Kingdom Canada Australia But the location of my business is in Chile.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sodimaccl
Does this have any repercussion or negative impact in the analytics ? Thank you.0 -
Title Tag Capitalization Impact on SERP Rankings and Click Through Rates
My company made a branding decision to use lowercase for all of our title tags. This, of course, means that our titles on SERPs are all lower case. Overwhelmingly, it seems that websites use title case. This makes me wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Does using lower case titles negatively impact our rankings and/or click through rates? Is there any data out there suggesting that title case has a better click through rate than lower case? Thanks for reading!
Reporting & Analytics | | Solid_Gold0 -
Adjusted Bounce Rate WP Plugin?
Hi Moz Community, Is there any recommended Plugin for implementing an adjusted bounce rate on WordPress with customtizable features for time on page to not be counted as a bounce? Thank you, Kristin
Reporting & Analytics | | Red_Spot_Interactive0 -
Tracking Clicks on a Global Header Across Multiple Sites
Hey All, A particular client has multiple websites and we're planning on implementing a global header across 15+ sites. I've been looking for a way to track the clicks on this global header across all sites (that is that they are summed up), what's the best way to go about this if I am using Google Analytics (I know Adobe site catalyst could do this no problem with some advanced tweaking), any ideas? I could do the general click tracking route and tag every link but that will only help me if I do that for each site (that being said, if the global header for all sites pulls from a single HTML, then tagging it would technically count all the clicks from all the sites, the only caveat being that I'd have to pick which Google analytics profile I'd want to track the header with). Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt0 -
Is it possible to use Google Tag Manager to pass a user’s text input into a form field to Google analytics?
Hey Everyone, I finally figured out how to use auto event tracking with Google Tag Manager, but didn't get the data I wanted. I want to see what users are typing into the search field on my site (the URL structure of my site isn't set up properly to use GA's built-in site search tracking). So, I set up the form submit event tracking in Google Tag Manager and used the following as my event tracking parameters: Category: Search Action: Search Value When I test and look in Google Analytics I just see: "search" and "search value." I wanted to see the text that I searched on my site. Not just the Action and Category of the event.... Is what I'm trying to do even possible? Do I need to set up a different event tracking parameter? Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | DaveGuyMan0 -
Wordpress site with increase number of Crawl(400 response Code) errors in Others section of GWT
I have a wordpress site http://muslim-academy.com/I check in Google Webmasters tool today and I see the increase number of errors in Others area of Google webmaster Tool.The error code is 400http://muslim-academy.com/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%AE%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%84%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%A6%D9%8A%D8%B3-%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B9%D8%A8%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%B1-2/%D8%B3%D9%....%3Cbr%20/%3E________________%3Cbr%20/%3E___________%3Ca%20href=?lang=zhOne of the example link of this error.Can you guide me why the number of errors are increasing and how to fix the existing errors.
Reporting & Analytics | | csfarnsworth0 -
How do i get Social Media Actions Tracked in GA
Greetings from 17 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/how-do-get-this.jpg The above url pints to dat I'd love to see in my Google analytics account but instead all i can see is this:
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/no-socail-media-engagementcopy.jpg What i really want to measure is Facebook Likes etc not just referral traffic from social media sites. So my question is please... "Do i have to add additional tracking code to Google analytics as explained here - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSocial " Thanks in advance,
David0 -
Google Analytics internal Site Search - Destination pages dispaly Search results
Hi, Im having a bit of an issue with Google Analytics internal site search, I am able to currently track the search terms through my website internal search but when I click onto destination pages I just get the search result page. When clicking destination pages I would expect to get the pages on which the user ended up after the results page, instead I just get the results page which is pretty much useless ?submitsearchXXXXXX hope you can help, look forward to your response. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Tug-Agency1