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Lately, I've been having the issue of a large increase in 500 errors. These errors seem to be intermittent, in other words, Google and Moz are showing that I have server 500 errors for many pages but, when I actually check the links, everything's fine. I've run tests to see if there is any virus on the server or if I have any corrupt files and as far as I can tell, there are none. I'm left with the possibility that maybe one of my plugins is causing this issue (I'm built on top of Wordpress). Moz is showing that I had nearly five hundred 500 server errors on the 12th or the 11th. On the other hand, Google shows that on the 13th I had 179 server errors and then an additional 200 for the 15th. I'm assuming Google is slow to find or report these things? I would like to know which is more reliable so that I can try to figure out which of these plugins may be causing the problem, if any or if I'm investigating this the wrong way, I'd love to have more suggestions. Thanks in advance!

Sorry, the url is http://www.heartspm.com if you'd like to take a look.

So I'm no expert, but I've spent a lot of energy and money with several revisions related to local SEO.  Here it is for what it's worth and you'll have to judge for yourself.

The more cities and town names you add to any one page the more you will dilute the organic value in the one town or city that is most important to you.  You may want to include the names of a few towns within a city if they are a logical and natural language why in which people speak about a given place.  For example, if you were writing a page about New York, you could logically include info on Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and (you might want to not bother with Staten Island), but you certainly would not want to mention services in Nassau and Suffolk which are well outside the city boundaries.  But that wouldn't negate the thought of a separate page for each borough.

So how do you deal with services across a large geographical area without massive duplication?  There are more and more problems arising with SEO placement with duplicate and "near duplicate" content.   On my core website I have tried to use templates with some success, where I generate pages for different cities and towns using some common content, but leaving room for custom content on each page - more than just a city name variable.  (Be sure that the meta data is also very unique).  For my business, which is pest control, weather has a big impact on pest pressure.  So I have a template for coastal, inland, mountain and valley towns - plus a few more.  Then I also leave room for additional custom content for each city/town page - to eliminate near duplicate content and to address real differences between towns.  Each town has it's own demographics and culture - so I address that as it relates to the products and services I offer.

Still, the best bet is to create totally unique pages for each targeted geographic area.  That takes time.  I am gradually addressing this, but wow, serving all of Southern California means creating a lot of unique local pages.  I your business too, I am sure that in different cities and towns you will find that customers have different preferences and budgets.  You can address that with unique pages for each geo.

I came across a company that for a while has had very good SEO placement, but with a tactic that I think will get detected.  This company has massively duplicate content, but it is not on the same website.  They have purchased separate domain names for every town and populated the identical content across these websites.  I am sure Google will start smacking this website soon enough.

I hope this helps.

Gerry

Hi Irving,

Thanks for your reply.  I will go ahead and speak to my programmer about implementing the NOINDEX, FOLLOW and Rel=Cannonical parameter.  I paid Yoast for an analysis and of course they recommended their plugin.

My programmer tried to implement it, but he said the plugin did not work with templates we were using for implementation of local city code we have.  Additionally, the Yoast team said their plugin doesn't work with forums ("as Wordpress doesn't contain a forum and it is unreasonable for the Yoast plugin to support another plugin."  So we would have to back out code we have to integrate our forum into our sitemap.  I don't know what we would do if we used the Yoast plugin.  It was getting very complicated.

I have been very busy reducing GWT duplicate content errors on my website, www.heartspm.com, created on a Wordpress platform.

Each month, blog entries are being archived and each month is generating a duplicate description by Google.  We post 2-3 blog entries per month and they don't really go out of date.  Most are not news related butr rather they are nuggets of information on entomology.

Do I need to use the archiving feature?  Can I turn it off?  Should I switch to archive perhaps once per year instead of every month and how is that done?  How do I stop Google from creating its' own meta-description, duplicates each month for these archive entries?  Should I have the archive as NOINDEX, FOLLOW?  I'm not the programmer, but I have some technical know how, so I have a lot of half baked ideas and answers that could use some polishing.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Gerry

I am having my own problems with Wordpress tags, categories, authors and archiving generating duplicate content errors.  Google is likely seeing the same page through the multiple lenses of tags, categories, authors and archives and seeing the same content.

I've been spending a great deal of time reducing tags and categories, which reduced duplicate content but also brought up a lot of new 404 errors to deal with.  I have also been adding unique descriptions and titles for all my tags and categories conforming to Google title and description requirements.

I'm not done by far but I am closer to the finish line.

A delayed thank you, yet a thank you nevertheless for some good recommendations.  My programmer is reviewing the Yoast SEO module and running into these types of issues that Yoast really can't help with.  We have a long list of issues we are addressing.  I'll write more when I know more as to our ultimate solution.  But you present some helpful options.

I had a site analysis done by the Yoast team.  Of course, one of their recommendations was to install the Yoast SEO product.  I see that there are many independent sources highly recommending it.

But my programming is coming back with some concerns. My website is www.heartspm.com, for anyone who is interested in further analysis of my issue.

My programmer's notes follow.  Unfortunately, they are a bit to cryptic:

"1. it does not do all for us anyway, so we'd have to keep the one's I made
before anyway, at least partially, but it will add up to complexety, loading
time as all new, and especially one-size-fits all plugins

2. another problem - Simple Press forum. Yoast does not have an extention for it, nor is it going to work along with our existing forum's SEO handling solution. So, it's
either reverting back to original SEO handling or forgetting Yoast.

3. original handling means no meta description although I think Yoast will put just
one description for each page, and title will be something like "<forum <br="">title> - <topic title="">whatever else you may want"

4. the same thing with XML sitemap

5. we won't be able to use Yoast's because it won't handle cities

6. and hopefully it will work with our existing XML sitemap solution as this can be turned off"

Now, The Yoast team admitted and logically said that the Yoast plugin cannot support another plugin and therefore it does not support forums.  We currently integrate the forum into our Wordpress site and perhaps imperfectly, but we are able to append forum links to the xml sitemap.   Do any of you have insight into how one incorporates a forum into a Wordpress blog while using Yoast SEO?</topic></forum>

We have special parameter based handling of cities.  We used to pass codes like city=?zip and the like.  Now, the URLS are very clean looking, but they use templates to match up cities in a city table with content that is somewhat similar, yet customizable.  So my programmer seems to be saying that the Yoast tool doesn't seem to handle templates well or is not able to interpret it and get it into a sitemap.  Do any of you have insight into using Yoast SEO with Wordpress sites that use templates and variables for locals or something of a similar nature?

The Yoast SEO module also has switches to help resolve issues with duplicate content and archives and authors and multiple pages, i.e. page 1-10 of Latest News.  If I can't use the whole Yoast module, are there ways to use only parts of it or to strip it down to what I want?

Do you think with the above considerations, that the Yoast SEO module is not worth the trouble?

Thanks in advance,

Humbly,

Gerry

Thank you for a great answer!  I didn't think to look for a second set of meta data.  I'm the "user champion and SEO guy."  I'll feedyour info to my programmer.

I used to be in programming before the dot.com crash.  I found your bug discovery humorous as it brought me back to my old days with the very flucky things we would sometimes discover.  That's where experience comes in.  You just can't stop when you see what obviously appears correct and start yelling, "Is Google crazy?"  There's always a reason and I am thankful that you found this one that has been a huge plague on my site.

Thank you so much.  I was getting these errors returned in GWT but I didn't think to look for a second set of meta data in the code.

On my website, www.heartspm.com, I have been gradually changing over local information to remove near duplicate content.  I created templates to create near duplicates for regions (coastal, inland, valley, etc.  Then I also have been gradually creating unique pages for each city, such as Poway, Santa Monica, etc.  Either way, I have this component of the website built on a list of cities with SEO information unique to each one pulling in template information.

Now to my question:  I am getting most of these pages coming up with GWT duplicate meta description information even though the descriptions are quite different between city to city.  I am viewing the source page generated as well as the descriptions that are displayed by Google on the search engine.  These descriptions do not appear to duplicate to me.  So why the error?

So I'm no expert, but I've spent a lot of energy and money with several revisions related to local SEO.  Here it is for what it's worth and you'll have to judge for yourself.

The more cities and town names you add to any one page the more you will dilute the organic value in the one town or city that is most important to you.  You may want to include the names of a few towns within a city if they are a logical and natural language why in which people speak about a given place.  For example, if you were writing a page about New York, you could logically include info on Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and (you might want to not bother with Staten Island), but you certainly would not want to mention services in Nassau and Suffolk which are well outside the city boundaries.  But that wouldn't negate the thought of a separate page for each borough.

So how do you deal with services across a large geographical area without massive duplication?  There are more and more problems arising with SEO placement with duplicate and "near duplicate" content.   On my core website I have tried to use templates with some success, where I generate pages for different cities and towns using some common content, but leaving room for custom content on each page - more than just a city name variable.  (Be sure that the meta data is also very unique).  For my business, which is pest control, weather has a big impact on pest pressure.  So I have a template for coastal, inland, mountain and valley towns - plus a few more.  Then I also leave room for additional custom content for each city/town page - to eliminate near duplicate content and to address real differences between towns.  Each town has it's own demographics and culture - so I address that as it relates to the products and services I offer.

Still, the best bet is to create totally unique pages for each targeted geographic area.  That takes time.  I am gradually addressing this, but wow, serving all of Southern California means creating a lot of unique local pages.  I your business too, I am sure that in different cities and towns you will find that customers have different preferences and budgets.  You can address that with unique pages for each geo.

I came across a company that for a while has had very good SEO placement, but with a tactic that I think will get detected.  This company has massively duplicate content, but it is not on the same website.  They have purchased separate domain names for every town and populated the identical content across these websites.  I am sure Google will start smacking this website soon enough.

I hope this helps.

Gerry