Thanks Moosa! Just want to clarify a few points to be sure they don't get mis-understood by other readers:

Duplicate content

• just want to make sure they know, although duplicate content is not the best thing, there is no penalty per se

Cross Domain Canonical

• search engines will in fact crawl both versions. They will just not index the one with the canonical tag pointing to the source page.

Hi Ben

Highland's response is definitely a good "poor man's" way, and there's nothing wrong with it at all.

WordPress now offers site redirects through the wordpress store - I believe it's like $12 a year.

There is also this domain mapping trick, which seems like it would still work, but they do say its a little complicated.

-Dan

Hi

I actually think WordPress now does the redirects and fixes internal links now when you update the permalink. Try just updating it and see if they get fixed. (Although it may not catch internal links you've added within posts etc, just in the main menu).

If WordPress doesn't do this, just change the URL, change all internal links as needed and also use a 301 redirect.

A fast way to look for bad internal links is with Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Tommy

You can do as Aran suggests - a redirect would be fine for feeds you don't want being crawled.

But more importantly, you may want to consider not indexing subpages (like this one: http://www.mediaanalys.se/blogg/page/2/) - you can make this setting in Yoast.

Let us know!

-Dan

As far as I know Google is more lenient with sitemap errors, but I would still recommend looking into it. The first step would be to be sure your sitemap is up to date to begin with - and has all the URLs you want (and not any you don't want). The main thing is none of them should 404 and then beyond that, yes, they should return 200's.

Unless you're dealing with a gigantic site which might be hard to maintain, in theory there shouldn't be errors in sitemaps if you have the correct URLs in there.

Even better, if you're running WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin will generate an XML sitemap for you and it update automatically.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hey There

For the most part, it is not a good idea to just use tags as a way to try and gain search traffic from them. They are possibly beneficial to users internal to your site. Users may read an article and want to read other similar articles, so having a few tags at the bottom of the post can be useful. Putting tags in your sidebar for navigation is rarely useful, but if done in a somewhat user friendly way it could work. I generally avoid "tag clouds" or having dozens of tag links in one spot.

In terms of the tag archives themselves (like mysite.com/blog/tag/tag-name/), tag archives rarely look different than posts themselves or other archives. Unless you have a giant site, with so many posts, and tags actually add a beneficial way to scroll through archives on a very specific topic, categories do this fine enough.

And for indexation - if it's a new site or a site that has NOT ever indexed tags I would advise to not index them moving forward either. Unless in a rare .5% of cases this is done in an extremely intentional and strategic way, not for SEO but for users and site architecture. (Think of a site like Smashing Magazine or Search Engine Land with LOTS of content, that's a rare edge case where using tags for navigation and architecture might make sense.)

If you HAVE indexed tags already I wrote an article on how to safely evaluate and noindex them.

In general, I would avoid tagging a post with more than 4-5 tags. Tags should always be different from categories (like more specific things).

-Dan

Leigh

Just making sure you're all set. As far as I know, this will not raise a flag in terms of authorship.

What Williams is talking about is the "author archive" and if you're using an SEO plugin (I recommend Yoast) you'll want to noindex author archives and I even disable them for a single author blog. They end up looking like a duplicate of the main blog page if its a single author blog.

-Dan