Getting a lot more duplicate content warnings than I expected.
-
I run WordPress on many of my sites and a site crawl has found MANY duplicate content pages on the latest domain I started a campaign for.
I expected to see quite a lot on the tag pages that only had one post but even tag pages with multiple posts and author and category pages with many posts are showing as duplicate content. Is this normal for a WordPress site to have so much duplicate content warnings from the taxonomy pages?
I have the option to bulk noindex, follow the category and tag pages but should I do it? I get some traffic directly to the tag pages so removing the pages from search results would dent the traffic of the site a little (generally high bounce rate, low engagement traffic anyway) but could removing the apparent duplicate content actually improve the article pages themselves?
Or does anyone have any WordPress specific advice for making the pages not duplicate content? I've toyed with the idea of just displaying excerpts but creating manual excerpts for the 4 years worth of posts, some of which I have no personal knowledge of the subject matter so other suggestions are welcome.
-
Thanks, Moosa. The "What Should Be Accessible To Users & Search Engines" section answered the majority of my question but I'm going to hold off just a little bit longer and see if I can get a few more answers or reading suggestions on the wordpress dupe issue.
Thanks again!
-
Wordpress do have this problem whenever you setup a wordpress blog there are certain things that you need to change in order to make it fit for SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success this is the complete article that can tell you everything that you should be doing in order to get better at SEO on wordpress platform.
Hope this helps!
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
-
How would a redesign, content update and URL change affect ranking?
Hi guys, I have a question that I suspect there is no simple true or false answer to, but perhaps someone has done the same thing as we're pondering wether or not to do? We're taking over an existing site that ranks very well on all the important keywords and is obviously very well liked by Google. The site is today hosted on a sub-domain (xxx.domain.com). When taking over, we'll have to redesign the site and recreate most of the content on the site (unique). The site structure, URLs, incoming links etc. will remain exactly the same. Since we are recreating the site, we also have the opportunity to move the site off the sub-domain and on to the main domain (domain.com/xxx - 85/100 Moz rank) and do a 301 Permanent Redirect on all old URLs. Our long-time experience is that content on the main domain, ranks way better than the sub-domain. The big question is wether or not Google will punish us for both changing the content and the location of the site at the same time? Cheers!
Web Design | | mattbs
Matt0 -
Duplicate Title Issues using # anchor tags
Our homepage navigation uses anchor tags (?TabNumb=1#, ?TabNumb=1# etc) rather than directly linking to different pages to decrease load time (and simplify the build process I owuld imagine). These anchor links are showing up as duplicate titles in Moz. I am pretty sure if I were to use noindex or rel tags, that could have a negative affect on my search results. Any way to tackle this outside of a complete redesign of the structure? http://www.dedoose.com/about-us/?TabNum=2# as an example
Web Design | | sbnjl0 -
Why would a developer build all page content in php?
Picked up a new client. Site is built on Wordpress. Previous developer built nearly all page content in their custom theme's PHP files. In other words, the theme's "page.php" file contains virtually all the HTML for each of the site's pages. Each individual page's back-end page editor appears blank, except for some of the page text. No markup, no widgets, no custom fields. And no dedicated, page-specific php files either. Pages are differentiated within page.php using: elseif (is_page("27") Has anyone ever come across this approach before? Why might someone do this?
Web Design | | mphdavidson0 -
Can multiple domains compete with one another if they have the same/similar content?
Could an ecommerce site with a .co.nz nd .com.au domain compete with one another and hard organic rankings if the content of the pages are the same? All the links would be identical (apart from .co.nz or .com.au) the product descriptions, pages titles etc... would all be identical or similar (our page titles are ever so slightly different). Could this be hurting us? Thanks in advance ^ Paul
Web Design | | kevinliao0 -
Duplicate H1 tag IF it holds SAME text?
Hello people, I know that majority of SEO gurus (?) claim that H1 tag should only be used once per page. In the landing page design I'm working with, we actually need to repeat our core message stated in H1 & H2 - at the bottom of the page. Now the question is: Can that in any way cause any ranking penalty from big G? In my eyes that is not attempt to over optimize page as it contains SAME info as the H1 & H2 at the top of the page. Confusing, so I'm hope that some SEO gurus here will share some light on this. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | RetroOnline0 -
SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content
Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,
Web Design | | Ashkan10 -
Do drop caps impact the search value of your content?
A client of mine wants to include drop caps at the start of the first paragraph on the page because they think it looks nice. I found some css techniques for implementing this using a span on the first character to enlarge the size of just that character. First word of the first paragraph. Are there any seo concerns I should have for adding drop caps?
Web Design | | fivelinesmedia0 -
Are my duplicate meta titles and descriptions an issue ?
HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g; /75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
Web Design | | GardenBeet
/patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html This is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name? The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??0