Avoiding duplicate content on wordpress blog

Did you know that your wordpress blog is not completely SEO friendly?

Of course, wordpress is 90% SEO friendly with it’s title tags, seo friendly templates and the like. But there is one loose point in wordpress that spoils the whole show.

I’m talking about duplicate content. This matters most with Google.It does not like duplicate content on any site. And Google’s handcuff to this problem is Supplemental index.

Let’s see how Wordpress is responsible for creating duplicate content on your blog and ultimately your blog ending up in the supplementary index.

Villain No.1 – Archive pages

Villain No.2 - Categories

Archive pages
Have you set your default archive settings to daily, weekly or monthly? If yes, you are in trouble. When google bots visit your site, it sees the same content first on the post page, then on the archive page, and third on the index page. So it is duplicate content three times.

Categories
Do you have the habit of tagging a particular post in more than one category? Trouble again!

How to overcome?

Solution 1
- Do not archive pages. If at all you are archiving pages, make sure that robots/crawlers does not crawl those pages.
- How to ensure robots don’t crawl archived pages.
- Use nofollow robots meta tags on the archive template.Here’s how you do it –

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

-Or use this Duplicate content cure plugin – It automatically adds the nofollow robots meta tag on to the archive pages, so that archived pages are not crawled by google.

Solution 2
- Do not categorize posts in more than one category. One post – one category. Mixing up categories makes duplicate content for the crawlers as well as creates a non-user friendly navigation structure as users are likely to see the same posts on each category.