Solving duplicate content with WP authors, tags, categories
-
I've been kind of neglecting wordpress installations on my websites and noticed many showing duplicate content for pages showing under author and tags, tags and single post, categories and single post.
Should this be a concern? Whats the best way of fixing this?
Thanks
-
Thanks Sarah!
An alternative resource might be my article on Moz about optimizing WordPress for SEO
https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
There are also some prior Q&A threads that address duplicate content in WordPress:
- https://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-category-archives-index-but-will-this-cause-duplication
- https://moz.com/community/q/utilising-wordpress-attachment-pages-without-getting-duplicate-content-wwarnings
- https://moz.com/community/q/moz-analytics-telling-me-i-have-duplicate-content-issues-how-to-fix-this
Hope these help!
-
Seems the link in the above response is dead.
-
What I'd recommend are:
1. you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages
2. make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.
3. determine your canonical url structure and stick with it
There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:
(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)
Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.
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
-
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Is this duplicate content that I should be worried about?
Our product descriptions appear in two places and on one page they appear twice. The best way to illustrate that would be to link you to a search results page that features one product. My duplicate content concern refers to the following, When the customer clicks the product a pop-up is displayed that features the product description (first showing of content) When the customer clicks the 'VIEW PRODUCT' button the product description is shown below the buy buytton (second showing of content), this is to do with the template of the page and is why it is also shown in the pop-up. This product description is then also repeated further down in the tabs (third showing of content). My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript. With regards to point 2, is the fact the same paragraph appears on the page twice a massive issue and a duplicate content problem? Thanks
Technical SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Duplicate content due to numerous sub category level pages
We have a healthcare website which lists doctors based on their medical speciality. We have a paginated series to list hundreds of doctors. Algorithm: A search for Dentist in Newark locality of New York gives a result filled with dentists from Newark followed by list of dentists in locations near by Newark. So all localities under a city have the same set of doctors distributed jumbled an distributed across multiple pages based on nearness to locality. When we don't have any dentists in Newark we populate results for near by localities and create a page. The issue - So when the number of dentists in New York is <11 all Localities X Dentists will have jumbled up results all pointing to the same 10 doctors. The issue is even severe when we see that we have only 1-3 dentists in the city. Every locality page will be exactly the same as a city level page. We have about 2.5 Million pages with the above scenario. **City level page - **https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist - 5 dentists **Locality Level Page - **https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist/clifton, https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist/newark - Page contains the same 5 dentists as in New York city level page in jumbled up or same order. What do you think we must do in such a case? We had discussions on putting a noindex on locality level pages or to apply canonical pointing from locality level to city level. But we are still not 100% sure.
Technical SEO | | ozil0 -
Wordpress tags and duplicate content?
I've seen a few other Q&A posts on this but I haven't found a complete answer. I read somewhere a while ago that you can use as many tags as you would like. I found that I rank for each tag I used. For example, I could rank for best night clubs in san antonio, good best night clubs in san antonio, great best night clubs in san antonio, top best night clubs in san antonio, etc. However, I now see that I'm creating a ton of duplicate content. Is there any way to set a canonical tag on the tag pages to link back to the original post so that I still keep my rankings? Would future tags be ignored if I did this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Duplicate Content
SEOmoz is reporting duplicate content for 2000 of my pages. For example, these are reported as duplicate content: http://curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158
Technical SEO | | jplill
http://curatorseye.com/Name=âHolster-Atlasâ---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 The actual link on the site is http://www.curatorseye.com/Name=“Holster-Atlas”---Used-by-British-Officers-in-the-Revolution&Item=4158 Any insight on how to fix this? I'm not sure where the second version of the URL is coming from. Thanks,
Janet0 -
Tired of finding solution for duplicate contents.
Just my site was scanned by seomoz and seen lots of duplicate content and titles found. Well I am tired of finding solutions of duplicate content for a shopping site product category page. You can see the screenshot below. http://i.imgur.com/TXPretv.png You can see below in every link its showing "items_per_page=64, 128 etc.". This happened in every category in which I was created. I am already using Canonical add-on to avoid this problem but still it's there. You can check my domain here - http://www.plugnbuy.com/computer-software/pc-security/antivirus-internet-security/ and see if the add-on working correct. I recently submitted my sitemap to GWT, so that's why it's not showing me any report regarding duplicate issues. Please help ME
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Duplicate content problem?
Hello! I am not sure if this is a problem or if I am just making something too complicated. Here's the deal. I took on a client who has an existing site in something called homestead. Files cannot be downloaded, making it tricky to get out of homestead. The way it is set up is new sites are developed on subdomains of homestead.com, and then your chosen domain points to this subdomain. The designer who built it has kindly given me access to her account so that I can edit the site, but this is awkward. I want to move the site to its own account. However, to do so Homestead requires that I create a new subdomain and copy the files from one to the other. They don't have any way to redirect the prior subdomain to the new one. They recommend I do something in the html, since that is all I can access. Am I unnecessarily worried about the duplicate content consequences? My understanding is that now I will have two subdomains with the same exact content. True, over time I will be editing the new one. But you get what I'm sayin'. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | devbook90