Wordpress blog duplicate issue
-
So after looking at the set up of the blog ive found this.
http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/
http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/news/
http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/general/
http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/snow/
Content shown on http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ can also be found on the other 3 urls.
The permalink structure is set up as /%category%/%postname%/ which I want to change to just %postname%
Obviously i want to make things as seo friendly as possible so any suggestions to do this right without losing any indexed pages etc. I have limited access to make changes to plugins etc aswell as these need to be done through the development company who manage our site.
Cheers
Robert
-
Hi Jarno,
I want to keep the categories and yes ideally shorten the urls. I thought about changing ther permalink structure to %postname% instead of the current /%category%/%postname%/
Also I think I could chnage the reading settings to show only snippets of each post and add cusotm category text to make each category url as unique as possible.
This post http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success advises to keep category pages indexed so making these unique as possible is most likely the best solution to avoid duplicate content.
The last thing I want to do is mess anything up. Although the blog itself doesntget much traffic anyway so I can only make it better. Already implemented a few changes including adding google authorship for each user which seems to have worked well. Already ranked a new post on page 2 for "best ski jacket" which was only published last week (date says may but this was altered in publish settings to keep another post sticky)
Thanks for your help.
-
Robert,
I think I misunderstood/misread your original question. I've just looked at your site again and noticed that the archive category also links to its original position. So no problem on that part.
As I now understand it you want to keep the categories but for url structure you want to exclude them right? So you want to shorten your url right?
regards
Jarno
-
Hi Jarno,
Yes I have the tech knowledge to implement the canonical tag. Not sure which page you want to make canonical though? Each individual post?
All posts are found under http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ but each individual post can also be found under only one category. Im still going through a lot of the blog as i only started with this company 3 weeks ago.
A lot to look into
-
Robert,
do you have the technical knowlegde to include a rel=canonical to the pages? Linking it to the /blog/page ?
The other pages, like archive etc, can then still show that page only they tell the search engines that the original post is in the /blog/ categorie.
Hope this helps some
regards
Jarno
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply, I did think about no indexing the category pages but after reading this post http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success I thought otherwise.
Ideally I'd make quite a few changes to the blog setup but we are moving over to a magento site soon and then I'll have more control of the blog. I did a new post for "best ski jacket" which ranks on page 2 after 4 days. So right now I'm not sure how much of an issue the category pages are. Although the page that ranks is connected to a google plus profile so authority may play its part for now.
Thank for your feedback.
Robert
-
Hi Robert
Your best bet here would be to noindex and nofollow your site's category pages, in order to avoid duplicate content.
The easiest way to do this is with the Yoast SEO plugin. I know you said you don't have much control over plugins, but I'd highly recommend this plugin in nearly all circumstances anyway.
Once installed, click on the SEO button on the left hand navigation in the admin area and then click on titles and metas:
http://i.imgur.com/jqw4fXc.png
Once there, click on the taxonomies tag and make your settings something like this:
http://i.imgur.com/STo93Sq.png
That will noindex and nofollow the pages, meaning that they won't be indexed with the duplicate content on your blog. You can also do the same on the "other" tab to noindex,nofollow author tags as well.
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
-
Duplicate content issue, across site domains (blogging)
Hi all, I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs. http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
On-Page Optimization | | ketanmv
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website. I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/ The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice! Ketan0 -
Duplicate content with mine other websites
Hi,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
I have a primary website www.vietnamvisacorp.com and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. What the best solution for this issue? Please help! p/s: I am a webmaster of all websites duplicate content Thank you!0 -
Disabling archives in wordpress
Hi! Do you think it better to: a) have all archives crawled (date, time, category etc.) even though they create duplicate content,. or; b) disable crawling of all archives? Ideally, I'd like to set up just excerpts in the archives and have a unique intro for each, but I'm having trouble doing this just now so was wondering which is the smarter option in the meantime? Thanks very much!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Assigning Locations to Wordpress from SEO Perspective?
I am looking for a way to split up and assign my 400 Wordpress posts to my business' four separate office locations. The four offices are in four separate areas with distinct city names. What way makes the most sense from an SEO perspective - assigning the city names as categories? adding the location as a tag, or some other way that I haven't considered? Currently, all posts are categorized by content and have no mention of location. Happy to answer any questions you might need in order to answer. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | SDSLaw0 -
How Should I Fix Duplicate Content in Wordpress Pages
In GWMT i see google found 41 duplicate content in my wordpress blog. I am using Yoast SEO plugin to avoid those type of duplicates but still the problem was stick.. You can check the screenshot here - http://prntscr.com/dxfjq Please help..
On-Page Optimization | | mamuti0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I have over 200 duplicate page titles on a site that I am working on. Does putting a date at the end of some of them make it a unique enough title?
On-Page Optimization | | SavingSense0 -
Ranking Issues Recently Popping Up
We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff. Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor. The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause. I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion. Domain: bonitaj.com My Thoughts On Possible Issues... 1. Text Content & Panda Update I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content. I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content. Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy. THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text. Do you think this is hurting us? THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages. 2. Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured. I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages. Do you think this is hurting us? I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic. In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages? 3. Lack of a sitemap? We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore. We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools. I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank? IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Duplicate Content and Duplicate Page Title Errors
I am getting a lot of duplicate content and duplicate page title errors from my crawl analysis. I using volusion and it looks like the photo gallery is causing the duplicate content errors. both are sitting at 231, this shows I have done something wrong... Example URL: Duplicate Page Content http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 Duplicate Page Title http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 Would anyone know how to properly disallow this? Would this be as simple as a robots.txt entry or something a little more involved within volusion? Any help is appreicated. Cheers Geoff B. (a.k.a) newbie.
On-Page Optimization | | GeoffBatterham0