WordPress Duplicate Content Caused By Categories
-
Hello,
We have a wordpress blog that has around 250 categories. Due to our platform we have a hierarchy structure for 3 separate stores. For example iPhone > Apps > Books.
Placing a blog post in the books category automatically places it into iPhone and iPhone/Apps category, causing 3 instances of any blog post in this category.
Is this an issue?
I have seen 2 schools of thought on categories, 1 index follow and 2 noindex follow. I know some of our categories get indexed, but with so many, maybe it is better to noindex them.
We also considered reducing our categories to 10 to 12 and use tags to provide the indexed site navigation as follows: Reviews (category) iPhone Book App, iPhone App Store (tags) but this seems a little redundant?
Anyone want to take this on?
thank you
Mike
-
Mike,
I specialize in on-site audits and related consulting - sent you a private message through the Moz member system just now about it...
Alan
-
Alan,
Excellent answer and we have been seeing slimmed down categories in our competitors, where they use tags to refine each post.
We are in need of some custom SEO consulting and training. We had a link audit and I am working on the results from that as far as Disavow goes. But, we need some specific site structure help, correct content creation help, and training.
Do you have any available services and available time in the near future for those services if we are a good fit?
thank you
Mike
-
This is definitely an issue. While there are many ways to go about resolving it, and each one has its own limitations and its own advantages, for most sites I recommend the following to my audit clients:
Reduce the number of main categories to as few as is reasonable where the ones that remain are the "bucket" or "umbrella" topics. An ideal number of categories would be anywhere from ten to twenty, at most. Any more than that overwhelms visitors and they become lost in the amount of time it takes to find what they want. Also, with too many categories, you end up with not enough individual articles in several of them, making those "thin".
Keep tag implementation to a minimum as well so there's not significant cross-over there. Each article should never have more than two, or at most three tags and tags should never be highly similar to categories or to other tags.
If any sub-categories exist, unless you can justify their value, it's best to noindex,nofollow those. Noindex,follow is NOT needed when those same articles are linked to from a bucket level category. And it confuses, weakens page rank distribution.
When you do this, it's important to 301 redirect old category indexes to point to their new consolidated versions.
Also, be sure to use proper pagination optimization on the remaining indexable categories using rel-next / rel-prev in accordance with Google's pagination guidelines.
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
-
Who gets punished for duplicate content?
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
Technical SEO | | Tobii-Dynavox0 -
Is this duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content?
Hello, My question is: Is it duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content? For example, here is the original page: http://www.saugstrup.org/en-ny-content-marketing-case-infografik/. But that same content can be found here: http://www.kommunikationsforum.dk/anders-saugstrup/blog/en-ny-content-marketing-case-til-dig, but there is a link back to the original content. Is it still duplicate content? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JoLindahl912 -
Cross domain shared/duplicate content
Hi, I am working on two websites which share some of the same content and we can't use 301s to solve the problem; would you recommend using canonical tags? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Https Duplicate Content
My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
Technical SEO | | RaviAhuja
2 Use rel=canonical
3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you0 -
Content Duplication and Canonical Tag settings
Hi all, I have a question regarding content duplication.My site has posted one fresh content in the article section and set canonical in the same page for avoiding content duplication._But another webmaster has taken my post and posted the same in his site with canonical as his site url. They have not given to original source as well._May I know how Google will consider these two pages. Which site will be affected with content duplication by Google and how can I solve this issue?If two sites put canonical tags in there own pages for the same content how the search engine will find the original site which posted fresh content. How can we avoid content duplication in this case?
Technical SEO | | zco_seo0 -
Duplicate Content Errror
I am getting a duplicate content error for urls for the "tags" or categories pages for my blog. These are some the URLs that SEOmoz is saying are errors, or duplicate pages. http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=Facebook http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=content+marketing http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=inbound+marketing As you can see, they are just the pages that are aggregating certain blog post based on how we tagged them with the appropriate category. Is this really a problem for our SEO, if so any suggestions on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | TalkingSheep0 -
50+ duplicate content pages - Do we remove them all or 301?
We are working on a site that has 50+ pages that all have duplicate content (1 for each state, pretty much). Should we 301 all 50 of the URLs to one URL or should we just completely get rid of all the pages? Are there any steps to take when completely removing pages completely? (submit sitemap to google webmaster tools, etc) thanks!
Technical SEO | | Motava0 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0