Comments on: Avoid Duplicate Content on WordPress Websites

By: Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella

Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:17:59 +0000

Hirsch,

Thank you so much for replying to this and confirming my suspicions. I was trying to find out what the deal was with duplicate content and if it was an issue, how to deal with it.

Your article might be out of date, but ultimately it answered my questions. Thanks.

By: Addicott Web

Addicott Web — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 02:11:41 +0000

The original article was written over a year ago, so things have certainly changed since then. I’ll have to update the post, or create a new post, with the more recent recommendations from Google. Thanks for pointing this out!

By: Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella

Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:25:14 +0000

I thought this was a great article and then I checked out the link to the Google page on duplicate content that your recommended and found information there that seems to contradict the need for these measures. It reads:

“Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can’t crawl pages with duplicate content, they can’t automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel=”canonical” link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.”

Do we really need to take these measures? If so what is the rational for it?

By: Mike Atterlis

Mike Atterlis — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:25:23 +0000

Great post, the reason why one should not have duplicate content is that it would confuse the search engines and basically could interfere with a pages rank.

By: Keith Davis

Keith Davis — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:34:35 +0000

I’m in the process of setting up my first WordPress site and have started looking at the Duplicate Content issue… hence my finding this article.

I’m used to static html sites, where duplicate content is easy to avoid, you just don’t repeat yourself. But working with pages that are not pages, just made up of includes from headers footers and all the rest… is a bit confusing.

Thanks for setting things out in such a clear and easy to follow way. I will certainly follow your advice.

By: Svetoslav Spasov

Svetoslav Spasov — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:03:52 +0000

Hey there!
Great article. I just added your recommendations to my robots.txt. You forgot one important string, though- /author. Because, if it’s a one author blog, the front page and the author page will be pretty much the same. Also, don’t you think that disallowing /wp- will prevent google from indexing your pictures? Just my two cents. Once again, great article.

By: Addicott Web

Addicott Web — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:14:44 +0000

Thanks for your comments Suzanne! I actually think that while there’s some definitely SEO concerns about duplicate content, it’s also more of a usability issue. Too much duplicate content can make it awful confusing for visitors when looking through a website. I’ve seen too many blogs where they have the full posts displayed both on the home page, on their blog page, etc.

I also think that it’s not necessarily Google’s problem to figure out the SEO issues of WordPress. I think the creators of WordPress websites should know what to do to make sure that their websites are not only SEO-friendly, which includes knowing how to structure the site not to include duplicate content – especially coming from a usability perspective, as I mentioned.

Regarding the plugin you mentioned, I think whether you use it or not depends on your familiarity with inserting some code into the header.php file in your WordPress theme. All that the plugin does really is something that can be simply – but for those who aren’t experience with it, or don’t want to bother delving into the code, then yes, it’s absolutely worth trying.

By: Suzanne of New Affiliate Discoveries

Suzanne of New Affiliate Discoveries — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:55:51 +0000

Thanks for this post, you’ve summarized a lot of basic wordpress SEO issues here. I found the same or similar advice elsewhere, but was looking for a recent post to be sure nothing has changed. You’d think google would figure out teh wordpress issues. Do you think SEOs would be out of work of google managed ot stop duplicate indexing wordpress sites?

One thing…I ran across a plugin for the header issue so you don’t have to change the code yourself. I’ts called “duplicate Content Cure” what do you think of it?

By: Addicott Web

Addicott Web — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:25:56 +0000

Actually there was no reason for not updating my robots.txt file with what I had suggested other than I didn’t have a chance to at the time, and then quickly forgot about it!

Re: the header fix, if you look at the page source you’ll see it does have a META tag that reads:

That’s the header fix I mentioned in action. What the fix really is is a conditional statement, so you won’t actually see the full text of it appearing in the source code of an actual page on this website.

By: Redouane

Redouane — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:17:56 +0000

Thank you for an interesting article. However, I tend to always check that bloggers providing advice are actually using it themselves.
I checked the source of your home page and there are no mention of the header fix you mentioned. eg. no noindex entry…etc

Also, looking at
http://www.addicottweb.com/robots.txt
I found
User-Agent: *
Allow: /

Any reason why you are using your recommendations on your site?