Blog posts, blog archives and duplication
-
Just reviewed a blog integrated with my website, and have noticed duplicate content - the blog homepage includes blogpost summaries (not a major issue as now set up so only put in opening paragraphy then anchor text to full blog post).
Then that's a full blog blog post if you click for more - then that's carbon copied over in the archive. So one near exact duplicate.
Is this something worth taking action on with nocrawl tags, etc., on archive duplicates of blog posts, or shouldn't I be to hung-up on this? I'm a scientist by training, so tend to go further and further once I get going...
-
Thanks Marcus - that's very useful. I am using Wordpress as it happens Off to do some reading...
-
Hey Luke
As a general rule of thumb, blogs will offer up a fair bit of duplication through tags, categories and archives so it can be worth not indexing those pages. For the posts themselves, you should have the option to create a unique snippet rather than using the first couple of blog paragraphs if you wanted to do that (best practice) but the duplication of the blog posts should be handled by the canonical tag so there is only one true instance of the article on the site.
You don't mention which blog package you are using but for WordPress, the yoast SEO plugin will help you easily deal with most common issues.
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
The plugin does not do this all on installation and requires some simple configuration to fit your circumstances but the following page walks you through the configuration of the plugin so you can make a call on what to index, noindex, etc.
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
What if you are not using WordPress? Well, I would still read the above article. It deals with issues common to most blog platforms and covers technical optimisation, template tweaks, site structure, conversions and most importantly for you (section 3 I think) covers duplication created by the blog, pagination etc.
Well worth a read if only to get you thinking in the right direction and if you are using WordPress, then the plugin and that tutorial will put most of your problems, if not all to bed.
Hope it helps!
Marcus
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
-
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
Duplicate currency page variations?
Hi guys, I have duplicate category pages across a ecommerce site. http://s30.postimg.org/dk9avaij5/screenshot_160.jpg For the currency based pages i was wondering would it be best (or easier) to exclude them in the robots.txt or use a rel canonical? If using the robots.txt (would be much easier to implement then rel canonical) to exclude the currency versions from being indexed what would the correct exclusion be? Would it look something like: Disallow: */?currency/ Google is indexing the currency based pages also: http://s4.postimg.org/hjgggq1tp/screenshot_161.jpg Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Chris0 -
Guest blogging??
Hi all! I heard that Google comes down on guest blogging. I did a search here on Moz with the terms "Guest Blogging" and not much comes up, as it relates to my question. So I'm asking: I have a website with specific content where I can implement a "team blog" (stackideas - easyblog), and have industry professionals submit a blog article (once a month on their respective industry focus), and add Google Authorship (link to/from their Google+ profile contributors section), but not allow ANY follow links back to their site. There will be about 10 different blog categories, and there will potentially be several different authors in each category who will be writing specific focused content per category. Any potential Panda (or any other animal 😉 problems with that? Thanks all! BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
404 in Google cache for one of my blog posts
Hey Moz People, I'm getting a 404 when I cache: this blog post http://www.inscopix.com/blog/decoding-brain-initiative and I'm not able to see what's causing it. Can someone take a look and let me know if they see anything standing out? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy0 -
Blogs and E-Commerce websites
I have recently launched an e-commerce website which has a whopping domain authority of 1! I was thinking about adding a blog to it (it's in open cart), but that would mean creating it in a wordpress but using the same domain name. Would this be beneficial from an SEO stand point (i.e sending traffic to w blog that isn't actually on the e-commerce website itself) , or am I better off creating content as blogs/articles on other people sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
Penalized for duplication?
Hi there, In February 2012 one my web pages (.co.uk) dropped from page 1 to page 5 for the keyword 'Menopause' and was replaced with a .PDF Late January 2012 I launched a duplicate version of this webpage however targeting .ie due to difference currency and legalities, I had made sure in webmaster tools that both websites were both Geographically correct, I am also using hreflang tags on both webpages. One thing that is strange is if I copy the first few paragraphs of the webpage in question into Google.co.uk, it's the .ie webpage that appears. Any help would be appreciated in why this has happened. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Is this duplicate content?
My client has several articles and pages that have 2 different URLs For example: /bc-blazes-construction-trail is the same article as: /article.cfm?intDocID=22572 I was not sure if this was duplicate content or not ... Or if I should be putting "/article.cfm" into the robots.txt file or not.. if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome! Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560