Wordpress categories causing too many links/duplicate content?
-
I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?
-
I'm currently using SEO category updater plugin. I have about 10 posts per category showing snippets of each not the full page. If I write a new title, and description for each page, about around 50 words of text would that be enough for google to identify the page as being unique? The problem is I have hundreds of categories so it could be very time consuming.
-
Chenzo is correct, install the SEO Ultimate plugin as this does wonders for deep editing of titles and descriptions for categories/tags and more. There is a setting that you can rewrite the URL from categories in the url to a specific post url.
I usually avoid having categories in the URL due to the issue you describe above of having multiple categories, I use a rewrite to just have a url such as /blog/post-name/ instead of /blog/category/tag/post-name/.
-
In the categories section in Wordpress, you can add a description for each category. This description will then show up on each category. This is a great way to avoid duplicate/thin content by adding a bit of unique content to each category page. Also, make sure only snippets of each post appear on the category page, rather than the full post, in order to prevent duplicate content.
I wouldn't worry too much about the extra additional links, unless you're talking about hundreds of categories. Having links to your category pages is a good thing form a site architecture standpoint.
-
Universal wordpress settings are not best practice and it is my suggestion to install - "seo ultimate" but only utilize the "title tag" "meta tag" features as it will allow you to structure the post/wordpress site to SEO spec.
Also giving you the option for categories etc.
Hope this helps.
Your pal,
Chenzo
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
-
Why does my site have so many crawl errors relating to the wordpress login / captcha page
Going through the crawl of my site, there were around 100 medium priority issues, such as title element too short, and duplicate page title, and around 80 high priority issues relating to duplicate page content - However every page listed with these issues was the site's wordpress login / captcha page. Does anyone know how to resolve this?
Technical SEO | | ZenyaS0 -
Shopify Duplicate Content in products
Hello Moz Community, New to Moz and looking forward to beginning my journey towards SEO education and improving our clients' sites. Our client's website is a Shopify store. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/ Our first Moz reports show 686 duplicate content issues. I will show the first 4 as examples. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-teardrop-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-orca-silver-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/silver-oval-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-spirit-silver-earrings As you can see, URL titles are unique. But I know that the content in each of those products have very similar product descriptions but not exactly. But since they have been flagged as a site issue by Moz, I am guessing that the content is 95% duplicate. So can a rel=canonical be the right solution for this type of duplicate content? Or should I be considering adding new content to each of 686 products to drop below the 95% threshold? Or another solution that I may not be aware of. Thanks in advance for your assistance and expertise! Sean
Technical SEO | | TheUpdateCompany1 -
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 -
Affiliate urls and duplicate content
Hi, What is the best way to get around having an affiliate program, and the affiliate links on your site showing as duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Memoz0 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
Solution for duplicate content not working
I'm getting a duplicate content error for: http://www.website.com http://www.website.com/default.htm I searched for the Q&A for the solution and found: Access the.htaccess file and add this line: redirect 301 /default.htm http://www.website.com I added the redirect to my .htaccess and then got the following error from Google when trying to access the http://www.website.com/default.htm page: "This webpage has a redirect loop
Technical SEO | | Joeuspe
The webpage at http://www.webpage.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer." "Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects." How can I correct this? Thanks0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a main sales page and then we have a country specific sales page for about 250 countries. The country specific pages are identical to the main sales page, with the small addition of a country flag and the country name in the h1. I have added a rel canonical tag to all country pages to send the link juice and authority to the main page, because they would be all competing for rankings. I was wondering if having the 250+ indexed pages of duplicate content will effect the ranking of the main page even though they have rel canonical tag. We get some traffic to country pages, but not as much as the main page, but im worried that if we remove those pages and redirect all to main page that we will loose 250 plus indexed pages where we can get traffic through for odd country specific terms. eg searching for uk mobile phone brings up the country specific page instead of main sales page even though the uk sales pages is not optimized for uk terms other than having a flag and the country name in the h1. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0