WordPress is definitely the best CMS platform I have come across till date. It is flexible, offers unbelievable easy customization and support which no other system can match currently. That is the reason it is widely popular worldwide and every third website is using it.
Apart from this, WordPress is also super SEO friendly and helps in easy updating of the meta’s and content in seconds. But there is a major content duplicity issue in WordPress that we usually ignore knowingly or unknowingly.
What is the duplicate content issue in WordPress ?
When we create a blog page on WordPress, we assign it a category or tag it on the basis of keywords. Though this is a good practice but we often tend to forget that we are actually creating multiple duplicate pages that can be accessed from different links.
E.g- If my post is under category ‘SEO basics’ and I have tagged it as ‘top seo company‘ it can be accessed from the following URL’s
http://www.semseogurus.com/duplicate-content-issue-in-wordpress/
http://www.semseogurus.com/tag/top-seo-company/
http://www.semseogurus.com/seo-basics/
You can see clearly that you have unknowingly created 3 different pages with same content which will confuse the search engines about which is the actual page they should display. Ultimately the search engines will randomly pick a page based upon their preference. The biggest drawback of the duplicate pages is that Google will penalize the website for duplicate content issue and after Panda and Penguin updates, the probability is that it will happen fast.
Now, the most important question is how to fix this problem.
The solution is simple. Just follow the steps I have mentioned below. It will take hardly 30 mins to get this done.
Step 1 :Find WordPress duplicate content:
The first step toward fixing this problem is to identify the duplicate content for your WordPress blog or Website.
Once you have identified the duplicate content you have won the half battle.
To fix this go to Google.com and search with your site name in this format:
site:www.semseogurus.com
See all the links and browse till last page and see ‘show results with omitted results‘. This will show you all the link for which Google has indexed your website pages or blog posts.
Now the important thing you should take care of is to note down the links for pages with tags, author, categories etc.
Step 2: Fix the tag, archives, author, category if you are using any SEO plugin.
Almost every SEO plugin have the option to non index the tags, archives, categories, date etc. You just need to find the option and unable it to non-index. This can also be done directly from Post section. Go to post section, inside this section there is tags and categories subsection. When you click on them you will see the whole list of categories/tags. Click ‘edit’ and select the ‘No follow’ option.
Step 3: Find and Fix the image attached path
It is such a small issue that most of the us are not able to catch it. When we attach an image to WordPress post, it adds images as attachment URL and when reader click on image, it will be taken to image attachment page.
So your URL would be like:
www.semseogurus.com/image.jpg/
www.domain.com/top-seo-company/image.jpg
Now there are many problems related to this one. First, duplicate content issue or very useless page is indexed in Google which is not adding any value. In your Google Webmaster tools, you will see such links listed at short meta description tags and that again is not very useful.
How to fix it ?
Go to the Permalink option in your Plugin. Inside it you will see the option “Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL.” Just select this option and save it. You are done !
The other thing that I believe we already know is the Canonical Issue of www and without www which is very easy to catch and resolve as most of the plugin have this feature by default.
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About us – Semseogurus.com is an Interactive Internet marketing Company providing SEO, PPC, SMO, Link building, Reputation management services. We are an ethical SEO company with focus on providing ‘result oriented’ services to our clients.