I have a WP site which uses categories to display the same content in several locations. Which items should get a canonical tag to avoid a ding for duplicate content?

[LindsayiHart]

So...I have a Knowledge Center and press room that pretty much use the same posts.   So...technically the content looks like its on several pages because the post shows up on the Category listing page.

Do I add a Canonical tag to each individual post...so that it is the only one that is counted?

Also...I have a LONG disclaimer that goes at the bottom of most of the posts.   would this count as duplicate content?  Is there a way to markup a single paragraph to tell the spiders not to crawl it?

[Jatin-Aryan]

Hi Kane,

Thank you so much for your quick response even in the holiday season, I really appreciate that. I don't think that there is any unique content on tag or category pages. I will go ahead and noindex them right away.

Once again, thanks for your help.

Happy Holidays...

Jatin

[KaneJamison]

Hi Jatin,

If you have any kind of unique content on a tag or category page, then it's reasonable to index it. For example, a category page with 1-2 paragraphs of intro text explaining what types of content are found in that category. In this case, any posts or post teasers showing up on that category/tag page would not be unique content.

If there is no unique content on that page, then I'd suggest noindex for category and tag pages.

[Jatin-Aryan]

Hello Kane,

I am also facing this issue and found some answers here in Q&A section. Most of the members are recommending to make tag & categories page non-index. But, you are not recommending this. Do you think that in the matter of duplicate content issue, it is better to non-index the tags and categories page?

If not, then should I worry about the duplicate content issues about these pages?

[KaneJamison]

Let's resolve the boilerplate disclaimer text first: it is fine to have a section of content that is duplicated on lots of blog posts - the most important consideration is that each page has a decent amount of unique text from all other URLs on the website. Now there are limits to this - if every post has 200-400 words unique content (not really enough) and the boilerplate is 500 words, then your balance is off in that ratio. If you have 300-1000+ unique words on post and boilerplate text that is <100 words, then I would not worry about that at all. However, you can use the tag that Nick mentioned if you want to - it shouldn't hurt anything.

Now, regarding the canonicalization of posts and how it relates to category/archive pages:

Each post will have its own canonical tag, for example:

• http://www.domain.com/blog/best-post-ever/
• http://www.domain.com/blog/big-announcement-new-product
• http://www.domain.com/blog/annual-company-report

Then each category page or archive page would have it's own canonical tag:

• http://www.domain.com/blog/category/announcements/
• http://www.domain.com/blog/tag/widgets/

When you are viewing a category or tag or archive page that lists a bunch of posts - there is only one canonical tag visible in the code for that page, and it's for the page itself - not for the posts listed on the page.

I'm guessing you're asking this question because you read that duplicate content on category and tag pages was common, and that is true. However - canonicals are not involved in fixing this at all. The thing with Wordpress is that unless you built a theme yourself - you shouldn't have to touch any of this. Default Wordpress with Yoast SEO plugin installed will handle this for you. I have worked on hundreds of Wordpress sites for 10 years and can count the number of times I manually specified a canonical tag in Wordpress on one hand.

The duplicate content of two pages such as your knowledge center and press room should be mitigated by 1) reducing the number of posts that fall into both categories, 2) making sure there is some unique content (50-300 words) on the knowledge center and press room pages other than a list of blog posts, and 3) not stressing too hard about duplicate content on these pages.

Hope that helps, please feel free to respond with questions if I missed something.

[JCon711]

Hi Lindsay,

I'd recommend limiting the number of categories you select for each post - generally my rule is 3 categories maximum. That being said, I've found that the most successful strategy is to create & categorize content in a way that easily satisfies your user's intent. Categories = broad topics/areas of interest your ideal buyer wants to read about (broad keyword search phrases). Articles/posts = focus on one specific question related to the broad category (longtail phrases).

For example: let's say you have a shoe company and you've created a style blog that discusses the latest trends. One option is to do what a lot of companies do, and choose generic blog categories like trends, inspiration, comfort, etc...

Let's say you research and decide write an article called: Best Shoes To Wear To Coachella (because it's a longtail keyword). How do you categorize it? It's definitely goes in trends, but it's also kind of inspirational, and you also have a section about comfortable shoes to wear to Coachella. You can't choose just one category, so you end up adding the post to 4-5 categories.

The biggest problem with this type of organization structure is not duplicate content - it's that users (a) can't easily find your content because they don't know what your categories mean and (b) they're confused about what content they've already read, because they see the same articles in multiple categories.

In my opinion, the better way to choose categories and article topics, as I sort of mentioned above, is to start with broad topics that people want to learn about.

Instead, you might choose categories based on popular search queries. For example: Festival Shoes, New This Season, Celebrity Favs, How To Wear It, etc. In this case, your article: Best Shoes To Wear To Coachella would go under the festival shoes category. You could also have articles about Stagecoach, SXSW, etc. This isn't the best example, but I hope this make sense!

Long story short: done correctly, this type strategy is helpful in a number of ways: (1) your user is able to easily understand where to find the information they're looking for, (2) you avoid duplicate content, because your articles are written to correspond with 1 (maybe 2) categories, and (3) your category pages will be hyper-optimized for lots of longtail keywords that are related to your main category keyword. This will make your category pages like mini-landing pages that have a higher probability of ranking broad/more competitive keywords.

I hope this helps!

[Chris_Hickman]

Hi Lindsay, Good questions. My recommendation would be to place a cononical tag on your posts and consider setting your category page to noindex.

As for the disclaimer, you can wrap that in the following tags to tell Google that it should not index that specific content.

 <code>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</code>