Solving duplicate content problems can help bloggers Rank higher in search engines and prevent genuine website pages from being trashed into supplemental index.
First we need to consider the common duplicate content issues on a typical wordpress blog.
1. Same Content on Index Page and Post Pages.
Duplicate content from last 5-10 posts appears on the blog’s main page.
2. Same Content on Category Pages and Post Pages:
www.example.com/2007/01/post-name
www.example.com/category/wordpress
Wordpress allow visitors to surf posts by category & date. So duplicate content from posts is shown on category, archive pages.
3. Same content on www and non-www version of your website:
yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com
In most of the cases blogs are accessible with and without the www subdomain, both of these will return the same page, means a duplicate of the entire blog.
4. Permalinks with and without Trailing Slash:
www.example.com/page and www.example.com/page/ are treated by google as different pages.
5. Duplicate Content in Post Feed:
www.example.com/2007/01/post-name/
www.example.com/2007/01/post-name/feed/
Wordpress Blog post feed is a duplicate of post content. If Google bot is indexing website feeds, genuine website pages may end up in the supplemental index.
Now that we understand the most common wordpress duplicate content issues, Lets talk about the possible solutions.
Solutions:
1. Excerpts on Homepage: Displaying post excerpts instead of full posts on the Homepage can solve the problem of duplicate content on homepage.
2. Use Robots.txt: We can tell google bot not to index certain parts of blog that contain duplicate content, like website feed, archives and category pages by creating a robots.txt file.
See my robots.txt file for an example.
3. Use the www preference plugin : This plugin can help us to preserve permalinks by enforcing no-www or yes-www preference. For Ex: Whenever someone tries to access website from http://domain.com will be redirected to http://www.domain.com
4. Use the Permalink Redirect Plugin : Permalink Redirect Plugin solves the trailing slash problem. This plugin replies with a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s permalink.
5. Use the Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure Plugin : Duplicate content cure plugin automatically adds noindex, nofollow meta tags in the header of all wordpress pages that contain duplicate content like archives, category pages, etc.
These were just the ways to prevent search engines from accessing your blog content through different urls.
A serious duplicate content issue is copying content from other websites without reference. This practice can get your blog penalized for duplicate content.
As a blog author you need to be careful not to plagiarize content from other websites, reference your content sources and include a backlink to the source website in your posts.
Technorati Tags: duplicate, seo, google, wordpress, plugin, robots.txt, supplemental results
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Posted on June 16, 2007
A very well organized and written post. I never thought that the presence of slashes or absence at the end of permalink URIs means duplicate content. Thanks for these tips.