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Duplicate Content in WordPress WordPress is an excellent blog application, but like most blogs it creates duplicate content that some search engines will find and penalize. This is because WordPress has many features for blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds, trackback URLs, and monthly archive which display the same content on different pages but for different purposes. Duplicate Content in the WordPress Sidebar Categories in WordPress are actually duplicates of your individual posts. In the sidebar, the content is sorted by date of post, again in monthly articles, and again in your daily pages. The headers are different, but that's all. Duplicate Content in the WordPress Home Page In most default installations of WordPress, the home page is also a duplicate of your individual posts. Duplicate Content in Word Press Feeds Search Engines seem to have a mind of their own and all too often will choose your RSS feed to display in search results. This is a problem, because RSS feeds are not human readable. Duplicate Content in Word Press Trackback URLS Many WordPress templates add trackback links after posts to make it easy for you track who is linking to your posts. Typically, if your post URL looks like this: ‘www.yoursite.com/2007-05-23/yourpost/’ its trackback URL will be ‘www.yoursite.com/2007-05-23/yourpost/trackback/’ and may be treated as duplicate content. Duplicate Content in WordPress Meta Tags The default WordPress installation doesn't have a tool to add unique meta tags to your individual posts. Your posts will either have no meta tags or site wide metatags that are the same for every page on your blog. Google is likely filter out your pages as being similar based on the metatags or place your results in supplemental search results. One of the users on the Webmaster World Forums tested this: Read the Test Results Duplicate Content Solutions for WordPress You may want to implement some of these solutions to improve your blogs search engine results. Add NoIndex and Follow Meta Tags You can tell the search engines what URLs to use by using the ‘noindex, follow’ meta tag. To do this you have to add the following code to the header section of your header.php page:
This code tells the search engine crawlers to index the home page, individual posts, solo pages like "About Me" and category pages and not index
any other pages. If you don't want the category pages indexed, delete || is_category(). The search engine crawler will still
crawl the page lookng for outbound links, but it won't add the pages themselves to the search engine results.
Add Unique Meta Tag Descriptions You will need a plugin to add meta tag descriptions. Here is one that has good reviews from people who have used it: Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin Add Redirects to Your Blog Computers are extremely literal and will see www.yoursite.com as a completely different address from yoursite.com whereas people see these as the same. You have to tell the computer that they are the same using what is called a 301 Redirect. To use the redirects, you edit your .htaccess file and add the following: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L] RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] For more technical details, visit: URL Rewriting Guide Edit Your Robot.txt File: You can prevent search engine crawlers and spiders from visiting your feeds and supplemental pages by inserting the following in your robots.txt file: User-agent: *
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