Comments on: Avoid Duplicate Content on Wordpress Websites

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?

By: Avoiding WordPress Duplicate Content Problems With Google | BPWrap

Avoiding WordPress Duplicate Content Problems With Google | BPWrap — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:10:52 +0000

[...] from similar problems. It is a well known problem and you can find an excellent article on how to Avoid Duplicate Content on Wordpress Websites, which gives the appropriate steps to take. The most important step of all is to have the right [...]

By: KeHoeff

KeHoeff — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:17:21 +0000

hey this is a very interesting article!

By: RSS2MYSQL

RSS2MYSQL — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:20:17 +0000

Well one thing I think is that as this time has passed Google has become more efficient at weeding out the abusing duplicate content and the non-abusive duplicate content. It’s easy for a new developer to get confused and scared by these rules, and wonder things like, will my header menu be considered duplicated content because it appears on each of my pages? Should I rearrange it for each section so avoid being penalized? Seems silly but I and others have thought it and worried over it before.

No no, don’t worry over that. Google should not bully you into being so detail paranoid. And they don’t.

I’ve heard Matt Cutts explain before that there, in truth, are no penalties unless Google thinks you are malicious. The penalty is the showing of favor to whomever Google things holds the original content, and completely ignoring the contender that holds that same content. That is the penalty – the non indexing of the page in question. This does not mean that your entire website is duplicated… and Google will not treat it as such, but only the page in question.

By: Scott Million

Scott Million — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:05:15 +0000

Thanks for the heads up. Now as you know Google has issues with duplicate content on most blog site. Google wants to show unique content. That means that you need to make sure that each page you create is optimized for different keywords. As said, content really plays a huge part with your search engine marketing campaign and if your site offers relevant content for the search queries your site could really benefit from this.