Thanks Kate! This is really helpful. I guess we will go with no hreflang tag, and just .com  and .co.uk sites

Didn't know about that last tag!

haha you and Lesley are giving me 2 different answers, so I'm even more confused!

Hopefully more people can chip in their comments?

Yea we are currently working on producing different content, including complete separate content + converting US to UK english, but there are some pages where duplicates are unavoidable.

I also thought this tag was not to handle duplicate content at all, but when you think about it more that is essentially what it is doing - it exists for websites that have the exact same content in 2 separate languages. It's just a bit confusing when  you have US and UK, since the language is the same, but there are still separate hreflag tags for them...

The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?

agree with Dan. If it's not any of the above and you are sure none of the other links are spam, you might not have been hit with penguin 2.0, but some other penalty.

I would check with other tools as well. Use as many tools you have at your disposal and create a comprehensive list of backlinks.

Hi,

I wouldn't block these pages from being crawled by search engines. Category pages are great for making sure more link juice flows to your deeper blog pages and making sure they get indexed. I believe author links give authorrank to the corresponding blog post too. I'm not sure about what you mean by 'read more' links. May I ask why you are concerned that these pages hurt SEO?

There are no limits, but as it is a rule of thumb that only the first h1 will count as h1, I'm sure Google has a way to discredit any xth h2 and beyond. I would use common sense to pick the more important title tags as h2 and classify the others as h3, and h4 so that you are sure that Google gives more value to the the more important titles than not.

The title says it all - if i have duplicate content on my US and UK website, will adding the hreflang tag help google figure out that they are duplicate for a reason and avoid any penalties?

Hi,

I wouldn't block these pages from being crawled by search engines. Category pages are great for making sure more link juice flows to your deeper blog pages and making sure they get indexed. I believe author links give authorrank to the corresponding blog post too. I'm not sure about what you mean by 'read more' links. May I ask why you are concerned that these pages hurt SEO?