My "tag" pages are showing up as duplicate content. Is this harmful?

[dlmilli]

Hi. I ran a Moz sitecrawl. I see "Yes" under "Duplicate Page Content" for each of my tag pages. Is this harmful? If so, how do I fix it?

This is a Wordpress site. Tags are used in both the blog and ecommerce sections of the site. Ecommerce is a very small portion.

Thank you.

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[MikeRoberts]

This may help: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-do-i-noindex-urls/#group

[EverlastingChanges]

Our wordpress was built using Divi builder. I have seen Yoast as a plugin on our site. If you point me in the right direction, I most likely could make it happen. I appreciate all the support. Thanks.

[MikeRoberts]

Are you using any specific seo focused plugins like Yoast or All-in-One SEO? They should have the option to update the Meta Robots tag to NoIndex, Follow.

[EverlastingChanges]

How would I noindex them? I tried searching behind the scenes in wordpress where I listed the tags, but was unable to find?

[MikeRoberts]

If your Tag pages are creating duplicate content, you can go back and NoIndex those tag pages & they won't show up as duplicates in the index. It may take some time for Google to recrawl, recognize they are noindex'd and then remove them from the SERPs if they were ranking anywhere.

[EverlastingChanges]

If you already have duplicate pages created from tags on a blog post... can you go back and noindex them to have all the duplicate pages eliminated???

[MattRoney]

Seconding adding noindex to tag pages. Unless you want those to rank—and I'm not sure why you would—that's a great way to avoid any issues.

I'm fairly certain it's not the worst duplicate issue to have, though.

[MikeRoberts]

This is a very common issue. When you publish a new blog post with tags, and your tag pages are index-able, you are essentially posting the same content to two or more places on your site. The two easiest options are either don't use Tags or make your tag pages Noindex.

[unikey]

I have recently discovered the same issue with one of my wordpress blogs that is using a different seo plugin than I typically use. It seems as though it has the plugin has the ability to generate unique titles and descriptions based on the name of the tag, but for some reason on this particular one.. it is not.

I can't speak as to how beneficial it would be to have these optimized vs. no-indexing them. I suspect it depends on how the tags are used. For some wordpress sites, having a tag archive appear in search results may not be of much benefit, while others may be a different story. I am interested to see what others have to say about this, but for me personally the tags are more for organization internally and to identify similar content which I display on the blog page and not so much about having another page I am trying to get indexed. Simply put, I have bigger fish to fry...but that is just my opinion.