SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content

This is the fifth part of my SEO for Wordpress series. Previously I wrote about title tags, header tags, filenames and meta descriptions. Today I am writing about duplicate content issues for Wordpress blogs.

What’s Wrong With Duplicate Content?

When search engine bots see duplicate content, they try to determine the original source so that they can choose which version to display in the search results. Duplicate content is often associated with content theft, spamming, splogging (example of splog: http://howtoblog.cc/?p=254) and other SEO bad practices, so it is possible that a site or pages within a site can be penalized.

Pages that have duplicate content in the form of excerpts are rarely a problem for the search engines. See this SEOmoz post for the full story on duplicate content.

Duplicate Content and Wordpress

Duplicate content is an issue for many Wordpress blogs because it is possible that the content from your post page is also on the front page, archive page for the day it was written, month it was written in, year it was written in and each category archive page under which it was filed. It is very possible to have the same content on at least six pages of a Wordpress blog.

This can confuse the search engine bots when they are trying to decide the original source.

Plugins Not The Best Solution

There are many plugins that solve the duplicate content problem by putting <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> in the header of all archive and category pages. This causes the search engine robots to not index those pages.

The problem with this method is that it is still possible to have the same content on the front page and the post page. Another negative is that a site will have much less pages indexed by the search engines, resulting in less internal links to your posts.

The Right Solution

Since the search engines are less likely to penalize a page for having a small chunk of content that is also found on another page of the site, it is best to display an excerpt from the post instead of the entire post. You could even go one step further and write an excerpt that is original.

The More Quicktag

Using the more quicktag, which can be found above the editing window in your Post SubPanel is one way to create an excerpt for a post. The content above the more quicktag will be displayed as an excerpt on the front page, archives, categories, and in searches.

Only the content above the more quicktag will be shown in RSS feeds. This can be a problem because many people don’t like partial RSS feeds and will unsubscribe.

Optional Excerpt

This Internet Marketing blog uses the optional excerpt because it shows a full RSS feed. Put the content you want to display as an excerpt in the Optional Excerpt editor. Then replace <?php the_content(); ?> with:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?><p>Continue Reading: <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></p>

in your index.php, archive.php and search.php pages.

Not only does this solution eliminate duplicate content and give a full RSS feed, it also provides a search friendly link because the anchor text on the read more link is the title of the post.
More SEO for Wordpress:
SEO for Wordpress Part 1: Title Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames
SEO for Wordpress Part 4: Meta Description
SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content
SEO for Wordpress Part 6: Organizing Category Pages

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Great tips. That sucks about sploggers stealing your content.

Thanks for the great week of posts. All of your SEO for Wordpress tips have been very useful.

I’m sorry to hear about your spam blogger problem, if you wish, I can have a look at it and see if we can put a stop to it. I’ve had a lot of luck in this area. Send me an email if you’re interested!

great article!

That is very useful but one question - does the more quicktag work the same way on the wordpress site (not just the rss feed) - does it shrink the portion of the post displayed, for example, on the headlines page, the archive page and so on?

Yes, the Wordpress MORE tag works the same except for the RSS feed. It also doesn’t allow you to separate your link from the ‘Continue Reading:’ text like the optional excerpt allows you to do.

It should also be noted that if you don’t have an optional excerpt on a post, it automatically shows the first 50 words of the post. This really helps for old blogs, because you don’t have to go through all your old posts and put an optional excerpt.

For more information on the Wordpress MORE tag see http://codex.wordpress.org/Cus....._Read_More

Thanks much - I dig into WordPress as much as I can but my blogs have some sort of purpose of themselves (pitiful as those purposes may be) and most of my attention goes into the content rather than the functioning. But I’m slowly working my way up that hill - you’ve given me a good place to check out for more hints about the trail up that hill.

Interesting post.

But, are you sure that Google considers archive pages and categories pages like duplicate content?

May Google know that these duplicate contents are made by the blog software?

Make peace, not war!

Great tips. Very useful. Thanks for sharing.

Hi,
Good post, but I think showing the excerpt posts in front page would not be a good idea because anybody don’t like to read excerpts in front page. and I personally don’t like

I totally agree, not everyone online does things the same way.

Very informative. thanks for that info mate.