Blog archives vs individual articles
-
In a client's blog, you can find each individual article pages as well as aggregate of articles per month or sometimes per day (including each entire article).
The problem is that the article appears twice, once in a dedicated page (article page) and once with other articles (in the archive).
Is there a specific SEO approach to this type of situation? Is there duplicate content?
What page name should I give each archive (if at all), as there are quite a few?
Thank you
-
Thank you Egol.
Your insights were very helpful.
David
-
I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.
I use the title and about 20 words. I use WordPress where that is possible.
For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.
I would try to use the first 20 words or first sentence if possible. If not possible I would move to a different content manager.
Just my two cents.
-
Thank you Egol,
I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.
For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.
-
I believe that Google is smart enough to know that millions of blogs have article pages, category pages and archive pages.
If your blog posts are unique content of substantive length and you only include a snippet on the category and archive pages then it is unlikely that you will suffer a duplicate content problem.
If you do have a duplicate content problem it will more likely come from scrappers grabbing your content or republishing your feed (that has full post content).
My approach is to allow indexing of article pages, category pages and index page but block only the pagination of the index and category pages.
If I blocked indexing of category or article pages I would lose thousands of visitors per day.
-
Thanks a lot Jeffrey,
Very helpful!
David
-
I'd leave it as "follow" since there's no reason to make it "nofollow" in this case. I believe that's what Yoast recommends via the plugin as well.
-
Thank you for your input, it is helpful.
Do you think I should simply do "noindex" or should I also say "follow" or "nofollow"?
Thanks
-
I would add a "noindex" tags to the archive pages and leave the article page alone. If it's the same archive setup I'm thinking of, there's little value to leaving this in the Google index so that's it's searchable.
Are you using WordPress? This can be easily done with the Yoast SEO plugin.
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
-
Wordpress vs. home grown directory
I just moved my blog from a wordpress hosted solution to my owner server and am really hopeful that all the SEO ready wordpress pages plus I downloaded Yoast SEO will move my site. I started with 9000 pages being moz indexed with tons of errors eyerywhere, I have almost fixed everything getting ready to do a google index. One question. I have a directory of businesses and events for my local mountain community that is home grown with about 200 pages. see here: http://www.destinationbigbear.com/directory/bigbeardirectory.aspx which has a PA of 21 which is the same as my DA 21 (I know terrible)... Should I migrate these 200 pages with images to wordpress to take advantage of all the nice SEO possibilities? I have staff and it would probably take about $600 bucks to do it. I would only have to put about ten 301's such as http://www.destinationbigbear.com/directory/contentcat.aspx?ParentID=7 would be http://www.destinationbigbear.com/big-bear-restaurants/ Thank you again to all, I am hopeful I can answer some questions in the future for people... I am learning alot! Nick
Technical SEO | | nickcargill0 -
Moving Blog Question
Site A is my primary site. I created a blog on site B and wrote good content and gave links back to site A. I think this is causing a penalty to occur. I no longer want to update site B and want to move the entire blog and it's content to sitea.com/blog. Is this a good idea or should I just start a fresh/new sitea/blog and just remove the links from site B to site A?
Technical SEO | | CLTMichael0 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
Job/Blog Pages and rel=canonical
Hi, I know there are several questions and articles concerning the rel=canonical on SEOmoz, but I didn't find the answer I was looking for... We have some job pages, URLs are: /jobs and then jobs/2, jobs/3 etc.. Our blog pages follow the same: /blog, /blog2, /blog/3... Our CMS is self-produced, and every job/blog-page has the same title tag. According to SEOmoz (and the Webmaster Tools), we have a lots of duplicate title tags because of this problem. If we put the rel=canonical on each page's source code, the title tag problem will be solved for google, right? Because they will just display the /job and /blog main page. That would be great because we dont want 40 blog pages in the index. My concern (a stupid question, but I am not sure): if we put the rel=canonical on the pages, does google crawl them and index our job links? We want to keep our rankings for our job offers on pages 2-xxx. More simple: will we find our job offers on jobs/2, jobs/3... in google, if these pages have the rel=canonical on them? AND ONE MORE: does the SEOmoz bot also follow the rel=canonical and then reduce the number of duplicate title-tags in the campaigns??? Thanx........
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
CamelCase vs lowernodash
I'm in the process of reviewing on-site URL structure on a few sites, and I've run into something I can't decide between. I am forced to choose between the two examples: MediaRoom/CaseStudies.aspx (camel case) mediaroom/casestudies (all lower case, mashed, no dashes) I would personally rather see: media-room/case-studies/ However implementing the dashes would require manually re-writing about ~10,000 URLs. Implementing 301s from the existing structure to whatever I choose would be trivial, so there is no concern there. Given the choice between CamelCase and lower-mashed, which would you choose? Why?
Technical SEO | | MRCSearch0 -
WP Blog Errors
My WP blog is adding my email during the crawl, and I am getting 200+ errors for similar to the following; http://www.cisaz.com/blog/2010/10-reasons-why-microsofts-internet-explorer-dominance-is-ending/tony@cisaz.net "tony@cisaz.net" is added to Every post. Any ideas how I fix it? I am using Yoast Plug in. Thanks Guys!
Technical SEO | | smstv0 -
Seomoz is showing duplicate page content for my wordpress blog
Hi Everyone, My seomoz crawl diagnostics is indicating that I have duplicate content issues in the wordpress blog section of my site located at: http://www.cleversplash.com/blog/ What is the best strategy to deal with this? Is there a plugin that can resolve this? I really appreciate your help guys. Martin
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO0